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.
Never let your government get away with claiming that #bikeHelmets are "the first rule of bike safety".
Rule number one is infrastructure, and the 2nd is air+brakes+chain mechanical soundness of the bike, upright geometry of the bike, traffic awareness, ride with fingers on your brake levers and having practiced emergency stops, twenty is plenty... Helmets are for stunts or a footnote to "don't fall on your head" rule that applies to walking moreso than biking.
Bikes don't need to replace everything cars do, like killing 40k Americans and life-changing injuries for millions more every year is entirely optional.
"...the SUV represents instead a uniform kind of selfishness, a collective indifference to community to which, alas, we are all more or less prone." h/t @TheWarOnCars
How is it that people are capable of magical thinking like we'll all get flying self-driving electric cars to save the woodland creatures etc but when they see policy with documented success like UBI, housing-first, universal health care, or low-traffic neighborhood transportation planning, they're convinced it could never work?
"the average modern American, by one estimate, travels 7,500 miles a year, and put in 1,600 hours a year to do that, they are travelling five miles per hour."
Now if we could all learn to see the hidden potential of pushing one lane of cars off the road.
@marcprecipice infrastructure is essential to Vision Zero. The bollards we need to stop drunk drivers, dead drivers, glitching driverless cars, distracted drivers, raptured drivers... they're all the same concrete-filled steel hardware. Yet no American city seems to have a #VisionZero plan which actually directs #trafficEngineers to literally slow down cars and prioritize safety (including equal efficiency/convenience) of other modes.
if we only ever fund technological innovation by and for the investor class, the solutions produced will always suffer from elite projection. We need a trolleybus every five minutes with overhead wires, not a computer to drive your minivan to the grocery store.
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
Electric cars are not actually zero-emission vehicles. “Even if all our vehicles eventually become powered by electricity instead of fossil fuels, we will still have harmful pollution from vehicles because of tyre wear.”
It is important to reduce the amount we drive, not just swap in "green" technologies for our existing habits. EVs take enormous resources to produce, electricity may not always be green, tires release pollution, and people are still killed in crashes.
@mbonsma having personally swept the bits of disintegrating roadway out of 60-some miles of SW Portland's bike lanes in the past week, the asphalt dust is going to be there even if they come up with green tires. And the noise of stroads interferes with birds singing to each other for a large area on both sides. This model will never be green.
"Today~130 people joined the Peabody/RAUC #bikeBus celebrated #NationalBikeToSchoolDay with our very own marching band by bike, courtesy of members of the School of HONK. Only the @bikepedantic mastermind could conceive and pull this off. Best Bike Bus ever."
People who see mastodon as just yet-another platform, what are they missing, for their volunteer org posting on twitter, instagram, and facebook? I think having some fediverse presence is essential to being inclusive, but what do I know. 🙄
Portland City Council, high on reactionary conservatism, accuses dead pedestrians of drug use in order to distract from their own car addiction. Do you see a lot of well-to-do people walking on streets with no sidewalks? Cause and effect must be so confusing to dan 🤦 who elected these idiots?
"it's not about my carbon footprint ... 100 companies are responsible for ninety percent of climate change" and if you buy a giant new gas SUV you're making a ten year deal with like half of them
If you support walkability and safe streets but only if zero drivers perceive themselves to be inconvenienced by the infrastructure, then you don't support walkability or safe streets.
State Highway Dept employee sees cardboard cutout memorial to pedestrian who was killed in a crosswalk on their deadly #stroads:
“[a staffer] was driving home,” Hamilton explained, “And it startled him. It was alarming.”
“Another one [of the memorials] was on a sidewalk and it was facing right onto the street. That’s going to cause someone to stop. It can really cause confusion.”
Scene: a wasteland of fascist car supremacy, stroads, millions dead per year, many more maimed, most of the rest coerced into working for their car and sitting in traffic awaiting extinction
Bike Advocate: "we should consider policy that prioritizes bikes, somewhat"
People: "not everyone can ride a bike."
😒
If the only reason you can't ride a bike three miles is the car traffic, do you think the car infrastructure might be the problem, or should we just wait to find some perpetual motion and infinite geometric impossibility in a cereal box? #climateDenial#carSupremacy
