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."
@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
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.