Tab Combs @DrTCombs@transportation.social

This week in Complete, Safe, Equitable Streets, we're talking about how to measure travel demand...in the most literal sense of the word: "I demand to be able to get to work, school, the park, wherever, safely, via my chosen travel mode."

We'll cover common approaches to evaluating demand, pitfalls of those approaches, and techniques you can use now to better understand your community's mobility needs.

#CompleteStreets #SafeStreets4All #CarolinaPlanning #PLAN639

This week in Complete, Safe, Equitable Streets, we're talking about:

-- the relationships between #CompleteStreets and #SafeSystems with the brilliant and lovely @sethlaj,

-- how one person's idea of the perfect street may be someone else's living hell, and

-- why it's seemingly so dang hard to make intersections like this one ⤵️ less hostile to everyone:

https://www.google.com/maps/@35.9303533,-79.0242746,144m/data=!3m1!1e3?entry=ttu

#CarolinaPlanning #SafeStreetsForAll

Happy #NewBikeDay to me!!!!!!

#BikeTooter

And the top prize for the category of "least effective way to start a sales pitch" goes to...

"There's no other infrastructure available, so this is the only option to get pedestrians around this small construction site safely!"

That's your carbrain talking. There's 39' of asphalt for 3 lanes of car traffic. THIRTEEN FEET PER LANE. On a straight section of road with a 35mph speed limit. We can't spare 3 of those feet to get pedestrians around this tiny construction site?

Yes, of course we can. If only we decide we want to.

The light blue line shows the posted detour.
It's 486 meters longer!

The orange X marks the site of the construction. The O is where I'm trying to go.

#ChapelHillNC is doing a lot of really good stuff for #walking and #cycling lately, but they're still fighting an uphill battle against #carbrain.

Today's example: town crew is installing a new ped crossing on a sidewalk on our route to school (yay!), but they've had to rip up the existing crossing to do so (ok, makes sense), and the detour they've provided adds more than a 1/4 mile to our route, and requires us to use 3 beg buttons to cross 15 lanes of arterial traffic (wha???).

#RoadSafety

Finally, we discussed how these 8 concepts (4 *why*s, 4 *how*s) related to our goal of informing more resilient, sustainable, equitable transport planning practices, viewing them through a 'coping vs. catalyzing' framework.

Coping is when cities act to tackle immediate problems; Catalyzing is when they used the policy window opened by those problems to also address other, perhaps more longstanding, challenges.

(see, the pic's handy) (9)

We used a qualitative factor analysis to organize the characteristics of cities' planning processes into 4 *how *factors, each generally describing a particular way of going about planning and implementing COVID streets programs: Opportunism, Crisis reaction, 'Normal was also a crisis!', and Agility.

Then we mapped the *why* and the *how *to see how they fit together (this fig. didn't make it into the paper, but I like it so here you go) (8)

150 articles became 20 (our screening was necessarily very specific; we go into the weeds in the article if you're into that) detailed reviews of planning processes for COVID streets programs in 28 cities. Through a thematic analysis (https://mural.co/) we identified two central themes from these 28 cities' processes: *why* cities acted, and *how*. (6)

This is why I get so damn angry when I see a modern day #pickup #truck or #SUV anywhere other than a farm or a construction site. And even then, there are safer options.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2212012224000017?via%3Dihub

#SafeStreetsForAll #NHTSA #Oversized

A stress drawing from 2021, when the needle-phobic kid was processing the need for a vaccine.

My co-authors and I -- a postdoc with no research funding, a guy who runs a non-profit in Latin America, and a soft-money US academic with almost no access to discretionary $ -- wrote a paper in our free time based on research we conducted and funded out of our own pockets, and now we're gonna be judged for not shelling out a month's pay to make it #openaccess

#AcademicWriting

Petition to treat every report of a high visibility pedestrian sign getting "knocked over by a car" as evidence that an actual person could get knocked over by a car.

They finally put the giant concrete block where it should have been all along.

I'll be honest I did not have this on my bingo card today

#MorningCommute #Coyote #UrbanWild #BikeTooter #SeenOnMyBikeRide

I'm not superstitious but rolling under a lift arm connected to a bucket full of window glass does give me a mild case of heeby jeebies.

So far so good

A more interesting angle.