#PBOT's "traffic calming" projects are such kid-gloves weaksauce that doesn't pretend to control the kinds of drivers who are actually making our streets feel unsafe. Their machines are 5-7000lb lumps of steel being flung around at 30mph with 400hp and Portland has, after a decade of organizing by neighbors and careful work by professional #trafficEngineers, delivered like a dozen rubber bumps and some paint. #tacticalUrbanism is this stuff but overnight, & then iterate
@enobacon I've never been a fan of those chicane-type traffic-calming devices. We have a local street with those chicanes, but with no side paths for cycles. It means we are forced to share the narrowed road with those racer-wanna-bes.
@daihard yeah it needs to have a bypass so you can keep riding while oncoming drivers deal with each other only, instead of trying to beat you to it, or some other nonsense where they are in your way. It's not rocket science, but it does require a DOT to remember that bicycles exists, which is an advanced skill. #BikeTooter#TrafficCalming#Bollards#Bollards#Bollards
@enobacon@daihard Unfortunately, the majority of those traffic calming things built where I live have no bypass for cyclists.
Incoming cars will often enter the channel even if a cyclist is already coming from the other side instead of waiting. Not to mention people trying to overtake inside.
While I recognize that they serve a purpose for slowing down cars, I absolutely dread them as a cyclist because they tend to encourage insanely dangerous behaviour.
@enobacon@daihard I’ve seen this bollard and bypasses in the UK and France, and they work brilliantly. Would love to see them in the US where only potential damage to a vehicle is enough to make someone slow down.
@enobacon@daihard The SF Presidio has a whole bunch that are just one-lane gates, and yeah they have bike bypasses on both sides. Really nice, and cheap/fast to install.
@lkanies it's not the traffic commissioner who is the problem, not even the director. The policies adopted by council (almost always unanimously) clearly say what our goals are: less driving-by-default, fewer deaths and injuries from driving, more equity focus, etc. But they don't hold the bureau accountable to those goals or set any measurable performance objectives, and then electeds play games with the budget, parking and other subsidies on top of that.
@lkanies it's like if you had a written specification for a software project that had a bunch of ambiguous prose about the user experience and then it required you to use a crufty old PHP library, that implements everything by shelling out to pipelines of shell commands which only work on solaris, with no automated test coverage, that had been through three generations of developers. The two ends are just fundamentally not going to match up or do what was required.
@enobacon look man, just let me hold on for a little while longer to my unrealistic dream that a new form of government might help my city in the ways I care about. 👀
@lkanies Well, aside from the "find out" part about choosing RCV to elect the mayor + auditor and then letting Mingus Wheeler appoint the city manager with all of the same hotelier / campaign donor priority / corruption... Maybe a more representative 12 councilors will be more progressive and able to understand what the transportation bureau actually does and somehow adopt policy that tell it to "quit that shit" like de-facto cars everywhere assumptions, car counting, thruway maintenance...
@lkanies there are just a really lot of windshield-biased people at PBOT, and most of those who don't have cars for brains are trying to design basic on-the-ground stuff with both hands tied behind their backs by traffic Engineering decisions, state/fed laws, and being inside a machine that is built to seek federal grants for everything they do if it isn't coddling cars, which they do with the "maintenance and operations" funding, the whole bureau burning $1-2M/day to basically go nowhere.
Every single time that someone looks at their #transportation options to get to work, run an errand, take the kids to school... and they choose driving, is ANOTHER CAR ON THE ROAD. Agencies need to quit acting like cars are their most important customers (more importantly, their budgets and revenue models not be structured that way) and account for the long-term insolvency that #motoNormativity#CarBrain#WindshieldBias imposes on the city. #VisionZero + #ClimateAction plans call for urgency!
Also, the solution to traffic speeds and volumes is diversion / a #modalFilter that forces people in cars to drive around an extra block or back to the main streets instead of letting everybody and their uncle cut through every neighborhood and then try to slow them down. Absolute amateur hour here at US urban DOTs, we've never heard of anywhere in the world that dealt sternly with cars.
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