What is it going to take to get through to elected officials and progressive transportation planners, that they're working with a machine that's been designed to build freeways through poor neighborhoods and coerce anyone who could afford it into cars? A machine made of #trafficEngineers and #police which then accreted a century of CYA, cultural, legal, and bureaucratic armor against change? Giving the DOT more money for safety won't ever get us out of #carSupremacy. It's designed to not.
The whole ten-year cycle of planning and public outreach and design and legislature allocating funding, to do some cast-in-place concrete curb-protected sidewalk with bike stencils on it, that isn't wide enough to carry as much bike traffic as there are cars on the street, with no design-speed consideration, sharp corners and blind spots at intersections... It was conceived & designed as a way to get people on bikes out of the way of motorists, who are the important road users with places to go.
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 π§ if you took the lack of network seriously & opened a city-wide project to fix it this year. #TacticalUrbanism
Elected officials can say, "look, you can have input to the project, but the issue is that speeding cars are making it unsafe for people to walk or bike here, and clogging up the transit schedules, so we can't afford so many lanes for speeding cars right now". As soon as everyone actually has the option to bike, bus, or walk to everywhere with dignity, much of the traffic will evaporate, and the politics about how much to spend building what kind of infrastructure will completely change.
@bananamangodog no, I fully understand why the high-dollar ranked choice lobby attacked the STAR voting campaign in Eugene with a flood of blatant lies on shiny mailers, I just still have hope for democracy if we ever manage to implement it. Portland will probably still biff itself in the fall, since the rcv people played that trick here too. The thing is you just need a willing city govt and maybe a bit of pull at the state level, it's not a question of money, just space that's already paved.
