The idea that you can have transit extend the range of walking distance without embracing bikes as a transportation utility, in the sprawling american suburbs, is just delusional. But it's the delusion that most of our city budgets and plans are built on. Biking in Portland is faster than walking+transit for most values of A to B but I can nearly guarantee you need to elbow your way through car traffic somewhere on that trip. Land use and transit need bikes for glue.
@pleaseclap there's actually a lot of good reasons beyond #ClimateChange and #CarbonEmissions for cities to invest in bikes as #transportation, geometrically the #HousingCrisis needs more density because multi-level streets for cars are extraordinarily expensive and we've maxed out the drive-and-park model that much of the US grew and developed under. #GeometryHatesCars so the only way out of traffic #congestion, also solves #AirPollution, #VisionZero is viable alternatives to driving, is bikes
@kim_harding self-driving cars have captured the imagination of people who are stuck in traffic but don't understand that #GeometryHatesCars. The investors are, as usual, just trying to capture more market... and don't be surprised when the code will start purposefully jamming traffic to keep those eyeballs captive a little longer and make more money.
@glightly Every state DOT at this point is essentially a machine for turning federal grants into paving contracts (with a splash of bike-hostile design to ensure that bikes and walking and transit are never viable.) Political pressure is essential but they need to be more than reined-in, IDK, like 0% of the realm of possible futures for policy/design & funding imagined by the staff + electeds is even real, #GeometryHatesCars#CarsRuinCities#HousingCrisis#ClimateCrisis#DefundDOTs#BanCars &c
It's not even: "I don't use this, so why should I pay taxes for it?"
It's: "I am completely unaware of the tremendous, heroic efforts that are required on a day-to-day basis to keep civilization running, and me personally safe, healthy, and comfortable, and I refuse to educate myself on the subject - so why should I pay taxes for it?"
The machinery of civilization is becoming ever more complex, yet people are still crying out for "simple solutions", as if there is such a thing anywhere outside of the fevered imaginations of populists.
@juergen_hubert in the case of transportation, simple solutions like bikes, buses, and trains are blocked from being viable by an exceedingly complex system of excuses and institutional inertia, while the problem of fitting more cars into a city than space allows continues to be unsolvable because #GeometryHatesCars. We'll distract ourselves from the fiscally and environmentally sustainable solutions with apps, AVs, etc. — anything but not driving huge complicated heavy problems into the city.
My new hill to die on as an urbanist transportation engineer is stop requiring traffic studies with development applications. They are an insidious cousin of parking minima, where some licensed engineer applies the ITE Trip Generation Manual, a collection of weak statistical analyses of very small samples, to figure out "how many cars to accommodate."
“We are in a #parking garage of a residential building in Williamsburg that is one block from two train lines, but was required to build parking. So we’ve taken over two of those parking spaces and built a fully-furnished and usable studio apartment inside.”
"Reeling from the rise of remote work and the ongoing effects of the Covid pandemic, business groups are embracing policies and practices they long shunned.
In New York City — which has 76 BIDS, the most of any US city — the effort to trim traffic lanes and make Park Avenue look like a linear park has been led by the business group there... Downtown Brooklyn’s pedestrian-priority plan came from a BID. And some of the most popular Open Streets..." #BikesMeanBusiness
@Billybobbell it's apparently difficult for the mayors and their handlers to understand that when the streets are 100% packed with cars, nobody is getting anywhere. The upshot of #GeometryHatesCars is you can either reallocate space for priority bike+bus networks, or wait for people to move out and economic failure to ease congestion.
Public space is the most valuable resource of #cities, and they squander it on cars. Not "but I need to drive" or "economic activity and essential mobility blah blah blah", we could have all of that with a fraction of the asphalt. Not even "driver convenience". No, it's just stupid extra lanes for the worst drivers to pass law-abiding ones and go wait at a red light sooner, and empty free parking. Wasted. #InducedDemand#CarsRuinCities#Urbanism
Perhaps it's a failure to understand that when something like a road allows customers from all around to reach your business, having twice as much of it won't necessarily bring you twice as many customers. It may scale linearly to some extent but then hits limits like #GeometryHatesCars & you ruin the value proposition for every other mode when you put cars in their way, constantly threatening their safety, polluting the air with tire+brake particles, fumes, & noise, until they choose driving.
It's simply amazing, how people will bend their brains around cars. But the absolute failure to apply basic logic to the problems cars cause you and your city is understandable. I mean, who can think their way out of a paper bag with a car parked in their head? #CarBrain#CarsRuinCities#GeometryHatesCars#BanCars
yet another #Portland neighborhood association meeting where the developer is going to build five units of housing with no #Parking, and that's the only thing neighbors are concerned about despite all of them claiming to be environmentalists. 🙄 #CarsRuinCities#GeometryHatesCars#FreeParkingOnADeadPlanet
"[114 mile] series of new and improved bike lanes will cover 17 corridors ... is meant to help the city reach its goal of 15% of trips being done by bike within 10 years" hey #pdxBikes is #Portland still going for that 25% they #ClimateAction-pinkie-promised? Count how many times you see 4-lane stroads in this video. It's not a "$4B backlog". Connect #PopUpBikeLanes into a #bikewayNetwork like Montreal (and Paris, and Amsterdam etc before them) or sit in traffic.
@tmstreet this seems influenced by Paris, might have more to do with travel & relatives than language though, i.e. people who went & saw their progress. It's interesting that the acronym plays into the french word for dream, rêve. But the geometry of removing redundant car lanes is universal, and that's all Amsterdam did long ago. They didn't make a plan to spend $4B and wish up was down, there's no other way around the fact that #GeometryHatesCars. Every city can choose this, or bankruptcy.
@dgouldin and LoL at the amount people are willing to tax their neighbors' housing to pay for the delusionary claims of traffic Engineers. There's gotta be a class-action lawsuit to drag them out on the carpet to admit that they know how Induced Demand works and that cars never stood a chance to get out of each others' way. #GeometryHatesCars Suburbs need to become clusters of 15 minute neighborhoods, and could achieve that, with what 💸 they're hopelessly spending on stroad widening.
"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?
Traffic planners who don't understand bicycles should not be employed by my city. #Portland is full of #15minuteNeighborhoods by bike (probably every single one by #eBikes), but you currently have to elbow your way through five-lane #stroads to reach those destinations. We're not in f'n space bro, we're in cities and #carsRuinCities, #geometryHatesCars - @bryan might learn that if he hadn't blocked me. 😂
Do #drivers understand that when people on bikes are passing them in traffic, it's because cars can't get out of cars' way? Get some of these people out of their cars and there will be fewer cars in your way lol. #geometryHatesCars I'm curious as to how the drivers who are sure "somebody else will ride a bike" imagine that's going to happen if they don't make it decent enough for themselves to do it.
Cities' elected officials love to talk about prioritizing transit but most of them don't have a lever to pull on for that. Getting cars out of the way of bikes and buses is something within reach. And if your city ever finally takes bikes seriously, enough people will be able to actually access transit. Politics/funding of #parking, #transit, #landUse, all works itself out once you connect and maintain a low-stress #bikewayNetwork. Wishing won't get us there, because #geometryHatesCars
#Portland#pdx has been breaking-in a fresh new #pdxTraffic commissioner (with no bureau director for 6 months...), and Mingus Mapps seems to still be focused on the stack of boondoggle carway projects #PBOT has put in front of him. Seems to think that the members of the Bike + Pedestrian Advisory Committees are here to lobby for more funding for the bureau of traffic to continue the status quo of maintaining the whole transportation system for #cars1stAlwaysOnly. Drivers feeling the $30M cut?
Two recent national media pieces on the harms of car dominance that just completely ignore the large number of people who don't have the choice -- they can't drive.
Not every article has to talk about everything but I personally think this is kind of negligent because it really does lead people to the wrong conclusions.
@owen and of course whatever number of logical hoops they're willing to jump through to make sure everyone has equal access to cars (and 12yo kids can drive themselves to school...) in the end, #geometryHatesCars