This is what #CarBrain does to people.
#CarBrain makes well-respected environmental advocacy organizations claim that providing facilities for all people in all public spaces is impractical, that people must already be walking & biking on a street before that street can have facilities for walking and biking, that investing in infrastructure for walking & biking costs more than infrastructure for driving, and that streets cause "car congestion," whatever that is.
Streets do not create car congestion. That's ridiculous. We, as a society, create the conditions that force people to drive if they want to get somewhere, even if they have to sit in the traffic of which they are a part.
Our complete refusal to provide for alternatives to driving, even when driving sucks, is what has created "car congestion."
You know what makes a road expensive to design, build, and maintain?
Cars.
Cars are wide. They are heavy. They go fast. They crash hard. It takes a colossal amount of resources to accommodate them en masse.
You know what's cheap? Sidewalks and bike paths. Orders of magnitude cheaper than roads built for cars.
@DrTCombs Plus you can make sidewalks and bike lanes out of permeable pavements with a lot less worry about contamination or pavement destruction, for a bit of extra flood mitigation.
thinking now about roads that started only as game trails or portages first
@DrTCombs I’m such a fan of Jarrett Walker’s framing of the geometry inherent in transportation problems and solutions. It’s such a nice counter to the tech solutionism that handwaves away the basics in a misguided projection of tech as magic.
@DrTCombs Hoping that the #Nashville Moves proposal passes. It will move us in the direction of making it easier to get around w/o a car #transit #UrbanPlanning https://www.hownashvillemoves.com/
@DrTCombs in Dublin they have a billboard that says “You are not stuck in traffic. You are traffic.”
@DrTCombs i have this irrational conviction that if everyone had to drive slower and complied, congestions would drop to a level of untimely vehicle breakdowns
@DrTCombs
A case in point, personal situation: looking to spend time in a rural area, and want to be car-free
The distances & terrain are perfect for an e-bike as the only means of transportation; a cargo bike or trailer has ample carrying capacity.
Can't (or rather, won't) do it because speed limits are 45 mph, with 60 mph not unknown, no shoulder or bike lane, and well, drivers do look at the cell phone ... So safety considerations determine the decision.
There is an unmet demand for safe infrastructure for other than car/SUV/truck transportation.
@PaulWermer @DrTCombs a couple years ago had to pick up sister-in-law from an ER visit, late at night on the suburbanizing frontier of Tampa metro. Multilane highways there have godawful dogshit bike lines just pasted onto the edge of 55-65mph highways, and AT NIGHT, I still saw a half dozen people using those shitty lanes, late, in the dark. Can you imagine what it would be like if those lanes were not the worst bike lanes in the world?
@dr2chase @PaulWermer I know those dogshit bike lanes. The fact that they are so famously awful and yet are still used under horrific conditions should be all the evidence anyone needs to support immediate reallocation of our entire* transportation infrastructure budget toward providing safe places to walk and bike
*minus whatever it takes to keep bridges from collapsing
Those builders could have constructed train tracks instead, or bicycle-only roads, or pedestrian-only trails, but they spent orders of magnitude more effort to make roads specifically designed to give people no option other than automobiles.
@DrTCombs I'm curious about the context?
I've noticed that at least a few "well-respected environmental advocacy organizations" are nothing more than conservatives who like to go hiking.
I'm thinking like the Sierra club in California, which aside from killing nuclear power in the 80s (an act which puts them on par with O&G companies for the amount of CO2 emitted) has also claimed that "suburbs are very green" because you know...grass...well it's the colour green.
I'm not sure what group this picture is from, but I'm no longer surprised to when "environmental" organizations don't actually care about the environment and instead just want to maintain the status quo, keep out new people, and maybe, if there's energy left over, clean the water a bit.
@DrTCombs the funny thing about this whole 'car congestion' argument is the fact, that wider roads attract more traffic. so car centric infrastructure leads to increased car congestion, because car traffic isn't redirected to a road of higher category.
@DrTCombs Which organization is this?
@DrTCombs I think Knoflacher had a good quote about this comparing it to deciding the need for a bridge based on the number of swimmers
@DrTCombs it is still wild to me that streets over there don’t always have a raised sidewalk as a matter of course
There is no such thing as car trip demand. Cars do not demand to make trips. People make trips. Often, they make them by car. Usually because there is not a better option provided. The fact that you can recognize a road needs to exist but argue that it doesn't need to serve the needs of people is absurd.