If cities applied “least-cost planning” principles, and so invested in the most cost-effective transportation investments, including improvements to alternative modes and TDM programs, and if roads and parking facilities were efficiently priced, people would drive 20 – 50 percent less, rely more on walking and bicycling and public transit,
Cities are beginning to realize that prioritizing cars in transportation planning is not only expensive in the short term, but comes with a whole whack of externalities such as lost productivity due to time spent in traffic, decreasing mental and physical health of residents, and a compromised environment. So it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that, in the recently released 2015 Menino Survey of Mayors, a full 70% of mayors surveyed responded “Agree” or “Strongly Agree” when presented with the idea, “Cities should make their roads more accessible to bicycles even if it means sacrificing driving lanes and/ or parking.
§
.. …telling pregnant women for drinking, or fat people for being fat, are all more acceptable than asking the drivers of Britain’s 30m cars if sometimes, instead of driving, they might get on their bikes.
there seem to be a number of things non-bike-riding car drivers might not actually understand about their fellow pedal-pushing road users.
Here are 10 things that cyclists desperately want car drivers to understand.
formal ‘desire paths‘ can form with as few as fifteen traversals of an unpaved route, creating spontaneous new trails shaped by pedestrians effectively voting with their feet. These paths frequently become self-reinforcing: others intuit the potential advantages of a newly-forming route and follow it, thus eroding it further and enhancing its visibility.
DYN@MO promotional video “Your Choice/ Our future” provides a quick overview of the main accomplishments up to now of the DYN@MO project, comprising the cities of Aachen, Gdynia, Koprivnica and Palma de Mallorca.
The video also highlights that new mobility planning and smart technologies create opportunities for changing mobility behaviour and creating a citizen friendly urban environment.
“The pedestrian and the auto mobile have equal rights upon the highway, but their capacity for inflicting injury is vastly disproportioned. It follows also from this that the driver of an auto mobile cannot be said to be using the highway within his rights, or to be in the exercise of due care, if he takes advantage of the force, weight, and power of his machine as a means of compelling pedestrians to yield to his machine superior rights upon the public highway designed for the use of all members of the public upon equal terms.
more
Protected bike lanes are the latest approach US cities are taking to help their residents get around by bike. But these protected lanes lose their buffer separation at intersections, reducing the comfort and safety for people riding.
What the protected bike lane needs is the protected intersection.
“if you feel the need to advertise reflective clothing for pedestrians and cyclists, you are advertising your complete ineptitude about building safe and liveable cities. You are shouting to the world that you believe cars are king and everyone else is at their mercy.” (Mikael Colville-Andersen)
Streets to live 