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.
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.
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.