Let's just imagine that we took the #ClimateAction or #VisionZero plans seriously, with the urgency to quit killing people for not driving (& killing plenty of drivers too), and some actual wish to survive as a species. NONE of the current plans are within 10x of doing it. You need a different strategy. Stop building for cars and just put the actual #StuffInTheStreet that you would 🚧 if you took the lack of network seriously & opened a city-wide project to fix it this year. #TacticalUrbanism
"The reaction from walkers, bikers, families, and nearby business owners was overwhelmingly positive."
“We'll have to see how we can apply pressure and what it takes to get the city leaders to listen or do something for safety.” (Try not letting #trafficEngineers over-inflate the costs with their convoluted excuses for trying to preserve car speeds.)
Paris now has 180 gorgeous ‘#schoolStreets.’ They are pedestrianized and landscaped streets around schools - to mitigate crashes, prioritize walking to school, reduce noise and air pollution. No brainer, really.
Person gets hit biking on left sidewalk / counterflow, because driver turning right out of parking lot onto busy street was only looking left. Do we think this is a driver error? (Driver was not cited. 🙃) Street has four lanes for trucks and none for bikes. 😞 infrastructure damnit #crashNotAccident
@bluGill yes but I bet if we had infrastructure which caused damage to the car when you make those mistakes, we would get the insurance companies to put that together for us. We could put buckets of sand in the street with a flag in them & be having some car-free #schoolStreets tomorrow #tacticalUrbanism, pilot projects, #StuffInTheStreet needs to be the way we do transportation project design + outreach, as operational problem-solving on a #SafeRoutesToSchool scale that gets kids out of cars.
I honestly don't believe #PBOT can't do the math on the weight of some concrete barriers, it's the value of keeping cars out of bike lanes that they just don't understand. Children's safety and independence vs the fully-imagined satisfaction of your "customers" that you subsidize at like $5/mile, it's a tough call. #CarsRuinCities#StuffInTheStreet#CarSupremacy#cars1stAlwaysOnly#trafficEngineers#InducedDemand
@danlyke@elliots what I'm hearing from "it is rare to have a curb like this in the middle of a roadway" is we need way way more #stuffInTheStreet so that's just expected.
Show up & demand that electeds take traffic violence in this city seriously, prioritize connected low-stress bike networks for all ages & abilities. #Portland cannot reach our #VisionZero or #ClimateAction goals without #StuffInTheStreet, budget priority to bike + walk + transit options, automated speed and red light enforcement, and policy leadership!
Council meeting at 9:30 with BikeLoud leadership testifying. Wear Red 🔴
@EricLawton indeed, but expecting everyone to select the option to not murder schoolchildren is the yellow armband of solutions here. We simply need some #stuffInTheStreet at least pop-up obstacles to car traffic, and some consideration of how to make the network function safely for kids first, by the Engineers of the transportation authority, if they're going to have any authority.
of course the PBOT planner who doesn't get it doesn't get it. Beaverton is urbanizing, but still using cars-first standards (probably needs to fire the traffic dept staff who are bringing these designs.) It's not the street cross-section is mostly terrible, but that they opened these new access streets to thru traffic from every single direction, besides parking garages built to old standards when the parking requirements have now been struck from zoning code.
the "I ride transit" #PBOT planners who think Orenco Station drive-to-Urbanism & similar results of #LandUsePlanning are going to move the needle on urban #decarbonization and make a dent in the 50% of GHG emissions that is #transportation in cities, need to see why half of trips are under 3 miles but families are just being forced/coerced induced into creating congestion by transportation agencies planning instead of doing #VisionZero#ClimateAction#stuffInTheStreet Urbanism, like Jersey City?
"This is the standard method that the Netherlands uses to prevent people from driving through a neighborhood, and they make the streets safer and more enjoyable for everyone who lives there."
"I don’t understand the #bancars hashtag [because his profession is not allowed to tell cars no]" #DefundDOTs#PBOT#pdxTraffic planner here
"Banning cars now would be like building cities in space and then banning spacesuits. We need to build places where people can actually live without cars." 🙄 uh, we already built those places and they have too many cars on them, then car apologists came & bulldozed more of it for free parking. Can we ban cars from #SchoolStreets?
"Before widening of SE 39th Ave north of Belmont St - April 1949" [to four lanes, near the site of the recent fatal crash into a bus stop] I guess I can see how PBOT's failure to offer solutions to the problems they've created would make one think that #BanCars is somehow impossible, but this learned helplessness just says to me that we can't rely on planners to fix it. Got plans, need #stuffInTheStreet#VisionZero.
The whole #transportation industrial complex is holding us hostage in a kind of Hunger Games setup where we compete for scarce resources to get livable streets built in our neighborhoods on absurd timelines that see entire childhoods pass by without being able to bike to school.
Streets need to be operated and maintained as streets for people, before you can pour concrete curbs that change the behavior of road users. The infrastructure needs to be drop-in, short notice, ongoing feedback, people get heard but non-drivers have places to go too + many are being coerced into cars by DOTs' failure to act like this is their job, or just willful negligence and fake science. If we put stuff in, they take it out and prove which side they're on. #VisionZero#StuffInTheStreet
The Bureau and Budget Advisory Committee is having a hard time figuring out how to spend too much money on cars and then also somehow spend money we don't have on adding safety, staff treats the committee like a panel of fundraising advocates, total farce #VisionZero#Portland#pdxTraffic
I think they gave everyone on the committee 3 green dots and 3 red dots, to put on the programs like "$15M pavement maintenance [bus lane road diet of 4-lane roads and diverters on greenways, or no?]" and 5 random groupings totaling $50-70M of additional parking etc auto subsidy.
Anyway, like how many votes should the annual 60-70 traffic fatality victims get? #VisionZero#StuffInTheStreet, or use rockets if it's rocket science LFG #StrongTowns
"Millicent Williams is the new Director of the #Portland Bureau of #Transportation." #PBOT "was capital program division manager and most recently worked as regional director for Otak, a Portland-based engineering and planning firm... the first Black woman to lead PBOT, and she arrives at a critical juncture as the agency is reeling with unprecedented budget challenges... "Together, we will take a pragmatic, ‘Whole Community’ approach to problem-solving"
Sounds promising, but I want to see #stuffInTheStreet, obstructing speeding #drivers. A "conversation" resulting in a rebuilt status-quo of cars dominating NE 7th-and-also-MLK is not going to get us to our #ClimateAction goals. We've over-invested in space for cars while neglecting all other modes, so some amount of removing cars from a connected low-stress #bikeWayNetwork amount of our public space is going to need to happen, and everything else is just stalling, especially capital projects.
Someone at this meeting, who says he rides a bike, brought up how people on #bikes don't follow traffic laws 🙄 . At least the #transportation commissioner pushed back with the fact that drivers do it more so and more dangerously, sadly he did not comment that all people on bikes follow the laws of physics and too much of our "bike infrastructure" does not respect that. If you want people to follow rules, don't make the rules and environment work against them. 🤷