Scott Lazenby, “Why We Should Pay for the Highway Miles We Use“, Governing. We expect to pay for services like phones and electricity and water that are reliable. Shouldn’t we treat roads the same way?
When you live or travel in a third-world country, you can’t take basic infrastructure for granted. Water might come out of a faucet when you turn it on, or it might not. Electric lights might work, or they might not. Something might happen when you flush a toilet, but you probably don’t want to know where the sewage goes.
Here in the U.S., we don’t accept these kinds of conditions. We have little tolerance for outages of services like cable TV and cellphones, water, electricity, natural gas, garbage collection and Internet access. We insist on, and pay for, reliable provision of all the basic services. Except one: roads and highways.
David Z. Morris, “Oregon just debuted this radical alternative to the gasoline tax“, Fortune. Some quibbles with the pricing structure proposed here, but the real story is the maturing technology (Azuga) that enables pricing distance, time-of-day, and other factors.
The program, called OreGo, is currently voluntary, with space for an initial 5,000 participants. Drivers in the program will install a small dongle into their on-board diagnostics (OBD) port, standard on all cars after 1996. The device will track miles driven, and report that information via 3G to Azuga, the private company handling the technology.
Darren Davis, “For whom the road tolls?“, Architect this City. Davis (@DarrenDavis10) follows up his black-box busting piece on traffic modelling with this on road tolling.
In a world where time is money, we are constantly berated about the economic costs of congestion. In 2011, the Toronto Board of Trade estimated that congestion in the Toronto region alone cost the regional economy $6 billion a year, rising to an estimated $15 billion in 2031 should no action be taken. More recent research by the CD Howe Institute pegs this figure at up to $11 billion.
Given these sorts of eye-watering figures, one might be tempted to think that car drivers, and in particular the goods industry, would be flinging their wallets open at the chance to buy their way out of congestion…
This brings up a fundamental paradox: Congestion costs the economy a fortune and congestion is a top-of-mind frustration, yet people seem reluctant to pay even comparatively small amounts to bypass congestion.
Adele Peters, “Downtown Dublin Is Getting Rid Of Cars“, FastCo. Dublin joins the growing list of European cities limited car access in its city core.
In the proposed plan, the city wants to route cars around the city center, and turn major streets into car-free plazas and passages for buses, bikes, pedestrians, and a new tram line. Along the banks of the River Liffey, polluted roads will become promenades. On Grafton Street, a former car lane will turn into a tree-shaded terrace with cafe tables, while the other lane has tram tracks. New bike lanes and wider sidewalks will be added as well.
(via @cowanrob)
Bob Dey, “Another contortion on development capacity“, commenting on a recent report which looks at how much housing development is likely to be economically feasible under the Proposed Unitary Plan:
[The report] raises the same questions as were raised in initial modelling 2 years ago, again without answering the primary question. That primary question, which is political, is: Should you allow the Auckland urban footprint to expand without constraint, or should you contain it?
…although I’d hope that question has been answered, it’s certainly been given enough attention over the years…
That’s before considering the second question, in the form of ‘how long is a piece of string?’: Which population projection for the next 30 years is the real one?
Will Penrose remain the heartland of Auckland industry? Will the poorly used Eden Park remain a stadium? Will South Auckland grow new types of business for a more educated population? Will Aucklanders occupy a whole range of different housing types as they move into quite different futures?
And the question that’s always waiting for planners who think in terms of finite frames: If we get the million extra people projected (on the high side of the scale) in 30 years, what happens in 30 years + 1 day?
Matthew Iglesias, “At last, a convincing theory about why the tech boom’s days are numbered“, Vox.
To keep growing, the technology sector needs to keep adding skilled workers and office space, and both San Francisco and Silicon Valley are running out of both. That means that even companies with perfectly plausible business ideas are going to find costs rising faster than revenue, and the sector is going to need to stall out until some companies fail and free up more resources for the others.
….So why not locate in Detroit, Cleveland, or Christchurch?
The problem is that almost any move you could make to mitigate your real estate problems is going to exacerbate your skilled labor problem.
The reason is that startups are, inherently, risky places to work. But if you have the kind of skills to get a good job at a startup, you can greatly mitigate that risk by living in a city that’s full of similar startups that need people with similar skills. You mitigate that risk, in other words, by living in Silicon Valley or San Francisco.
David Henbrow, “How problems which could be seen 40 years ago have not been solved and how an obvious solution was overlooked“, A View from the Cycle Path. Using Wellington as an exmaple Henbrow illustrates how transport decisions made 40 years ago influence urban mobility.
Here’s my hypothesis about why it is that cycling is still so unpopular in and around Wellington: The city and the surrounding area are treating cycling no more seriously now than they were in 1971.
The post is based on this fascinating video discussing the increasing traffic congestion and social isolation coming with Wellington’s suburban growth.
Adrienne Lafrance, “When You Give a Tree an Email Address“, CityLab. The city of Melbourne assigned trees email addresses so citizens could report problems. Instead, people wrote thousands of love letters to their favorite trees.
Officials assigned the trees ID numbers and email addresses in 2013 as part of a program designed to make it easier for citizens to report problems like dangerous branches. The “unintended but positive consequence,” as the chair of Melbourne’s Environment Portfolio, Councillor Arron Wood, put it to me in an email, was that people did more than just report issues. They also wrote directly to the trees, which have received thousands of messages—everything from banal greetings and questions about current events to love letters and existential dilemmas.
Kevin Montgomery, “This Is What Happened When Bicyclists Obeyed Traffic Laws Along The Wiggle Yesterday“, SF Weekly.
Hundreds of cyclists rode through The Wiggle yesterday evening in protest of a San Francisco police captain’s calls for a crackdown on bikers coasting through stop signs. But instead of breaking the law, protesters wanted to show the city just how bad traffic would be if every bicycle approached intersections just as a car does.
(photo via: @sfkale)
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Interesting demonstration in SF along the Wiggle. It shows how just projecting all the motoring laws onto cycling is a mistake. I think we should also adopt the Idaho stop. Along with left turn on red and across the top of T’s. It is perfectly safe, as the slower approach speed of a cycle, allows plenty of time to access if it is safe to continue.
Many shared paths lead you to a pedestrian crossing, where most cyclists already just ride across. This is safe and causes no problems, so why not make it legal.
Rules that make sense for heavy powered vehicles do not automatically also work for lighter human powered ones. There does need to be specific rules for these distinct road users, and pedestrians too. Each set needs to understand the vulnerabilities, dangers, and opportunities each type of user presents.
There is some work currently underway to review a number of existing traffic rules as they relate to cycling. Can’t promise anything overnight on Idaho Stop, etc, but it might lead to some improved clarity around some other ambiguous ones (e.g. passing on the left, impeding traffic, etc). I believe that a trial of a “bike zebra crossing” is also being looked at.
If a cyclist rides through a stop without stopping and gets hit by a vehicle on a green, who would be to blame? Cyclists I observe rarely slow down and in fact insist on maintaining momentum whilst committing (currently) illegal acts. Who is supposed to watch out for them if you make this legal?
If you made a rule for cyclists that said treat Stop signs as a Give Way, (which is what the “Idaho Stop” rule is), then its a the cyclists fault just as it would be if they did the same at a “real” give way.
As for “fault” its a notional thing as under ACC the cyclists is covered regardless of “fault”, its only for whether the car driver gets pinged by the police for hitting the cyclist.
And clearly if the onus is on the cyclist to give way to ALL other traffic and they hit or get hit by something, they’re clearly at fault.
Nothing to see, move along.
This kind of comment (Ricardo’s) can only possibly be made by a non-biker rider. The idea that fault is the important issue here borders on the obscene: in this scenario one party will be dead or very nearly and the other worrying about whose fault it was. This simple fact is what governs all decisions made by bike riders on our roads in the real world.
When a bike rider makes the decision to roll through a stop they do that in full knowledge of the potential cost, and I can assure you that is a lot less abstract than points of law or blame. You feel it in your very being.
Bike riders on our criminally unsafe roads take more responsibility for their actions everyday than anyone in the comfort of their big tin box. And remember most bike riders are also drivers so it isn’t about distinct groups of people but rather the same people using the same amenity in different ways.
It’s called concern trolling; you criticize an idea but try and deliver it as a genuine concern, stops people doing good things from actually doing them while they engage.
Things riders do on occasion, with no negative effect on anyone’s safety:
– Share a pedestrian phase to avoid conflict with cars/buses. (I’ll cop to doing this at Symonds St/K Rd to avoid being left-hooked by cars rushing for the motorway on-ramp.)
– Ride carefully through an empty intersection.
– Ride carefully through an empty non-intersection pedestrian crossing.
Things riders do not do, unless they have disastrously lost control:
-Run through red lights when traffic is coming from the other direction.
I’m sick of anti-cyclist rhetoric that conflates the former with the latter. It’s a disingenuous attempt to paint people riding bikes as reckless and to blame them for injuries and deaths caused by the unsafe design of our infrastructure and the unsafe behaviour of drivers.
“If I run over a cyclist, will I go to jail?” Noone is proposing to introduce rules that give two vehicles with conflicting paths equal right of way to entrap you.
I regularly share a pedestrian phase so that I can safely get on the road to start my commute instead of having to turn right onto a major road near an intersection (crossing a painted median which is usually full of cars waiting to turn right) from my driveway.
Good video of Wellington. I didn’t know Bill Sutch was anti-motorway, perhaps he could have escaped from the SIS if he had used a car! http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10403873
This link has a story from the Australian Financial Review (AFR) about the overwhelming success of the Gold Coast LRT, celebrating its 1st birthday with daily patronage targets exceeded by 33% and acting as a catalyst for urban development and renewal at a rate not seem since before the GFC.
Even the Gold Coast mayor is now a convert: “Gold Coast mayor Tom Tate was a self-confessed sceptic about the tram project, fearing it would cost a lot more than a rapid bus network, but he has been won over.”
“Public transport use on the Gold Coast has increased by 20 per cent in the past year and has become crucial for signature events such as the Gold Coast Marathon and V8 Super Cars.”
However is is not 100% tickety boo. Seems the usual central government political instransigence shown here is also evident there too:
“There are plans for the second 7-kilometre stage to link the Gold Coast to Brisbane via heavy rail from Helensvale before the 2018 Commonwealth Games, provided the Queensland and federal governments can resolve a long-running dispute over funding. Prime Minister Tony Abbott does not support funding urban rail, but might be able to make a contribution by funding for the Games.”
If cyclists want cycling to be respected as a full-fledged mode of travel they need to do their part and act like one, not set themselves apart as particularly privileged. It will go a lot better if they obey traffic laws, though if no cars are visible while approaching a stop sign, that may be an opportunity for flexibility. I did most of my cycling in Wisconsin where cycling has been a very big thing for decades (and has produced more than a few Olympic cyclists). There, if you violated a traffic law you would get the same ticket a car would. They also required bikes to be registered and undergo an annual safety inspection.
The cartoon is great. I could add a couple dozen more words to the list. While some professional lingo is to be expected, obfuscation, backside covering, and deception by bs isn’t.
“Should you allow the Auckland urban footprint to expand without constraint, or should you contain it?” I didn’t know those were the only alternatives.
“But if you have the kind of skills to get a good job at a startup, you can greatly mitigate that risk by living in a city that’s full of similar startups that need people with similar skills.” Very very very not new.
Steve that’s all well and good in theory but in practice it doesn’t work because the road rules are in fact powered vehicle rules. It suits no one to try to pretend the same conditions exist for these two kinds of road users anymore than it does to treat pedestrians the same as truck drivers. It is not a question of privilege but of appropriateness.
The day the road code understands the unique vulnerabilities and responsibilities of people on bikes is the day I will follow them to the letter when riding. Till then I will defer to staying alive over being a perfect little rule follower.
Agreed. The road rules make no sense for bikes and it can be more dangerous to follow them than not. I try to obey just two rules when riding:
1. Don’t endanger anyone (including myself or course)
2. Don’t unnecessarily inconvenience anyone
I hate this idea that everyone riding a bike is on some public relations exercise on behalf of everyone else who rides a bike. Motorists and pedestrians aren’t held responsible for the behaviour of other motorists and pedestrians so why should this be the case for bikes.
Exactly. I am keenly aware of not hitting or even alarming pedestrians when riding; so much so that I largely refuse to ride on the footpath even when the road is so incompetently designed as to make it personally risky to use on a bike. I will however ride slowly through a ped phase if there is space, always giving way to the more vulnerable pedestrian. Drivers should be grateful for this as I get out of their way and up to speed after the intersection when they accelerate off. I fail to understand the indignation of some sad drivers who resent this. If it so looks like such a great ‘privilege’ then grab a bike and enjoy the same advantage….
My wife is much more sensible than me and pretty much won’t ride on the road at all. Riding together is pretty difficult under these circumstances.
+1. If it makes sense to apply the same rules to bikes and cars, perhaps we should redesign the road code so that the same rules apply to cars and trucks? Queensland has some good ones: http://www.tmr.qld.gov.au/Safety/Queensland-road-rules/Heavy-vehicle-rules.aspx
Boggles my mind that people want bikes to “follow the road rules”. If I actually came to a stop regardless of whether it was clear at the one stop sign on my trip, cars behind me would honk, try to squeeze past me etc. People who don’t cycle complain about multiple mutually exclusive things that people on bikes do.
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. They simply resent that they, not you are trapped inside a stuffy steel box.
Funny, the them and us and we are always right attitude won’t work sailor Boy.