A Pool Noodle As A Bike Safety Hack?

The bike noodle hack has been around for a long time. Yes, it’s clever. But the sad fact is that the onus for safety is on the bike rider, rather than on drivers of motor vehicles, who kill thousands of people waking and riding biked every year in the US, and on engineers and planners, who should be designing streets and roads that are safe for the most vulnerable users: people on bikes and walking. Let’s talk about how NOT TO GET HIT by a car.

Why every cyclist needs a pool noodle

By Annalisa van den Bergh May 17, 2019

The hard truth is that bicycles are still largely seen as a nuisance on the road. We’re on the margins—literally. Cyclists are reminded of this every time we get skimmed by a car. According to the World Health Organization, over half of international traffic deaths involve vulnerable road users such as cyclists. And because Americans are among the least avid cyclists in the world, they’re among the most likely to get killed by a car.

Read the story:

https://qz.com/1620913/the-best-cycling-hack-is-a-pool-noodle/?fbclid=IwAR3ohKgA6PyS3jjvI8g5LPiyoRnDeyjyJxbjwCSyENmT_070cFw-8eYJAvg

May 17, 2019

Parking Problems Everywhere

The issues of parking in Australia are the same as those in the US. Comforting to know that we’re not alone struggling with this, and in every city with the same problem, it all comes down to #toomanycars. There’s tension between the auto industry desperately trying to keep cars on the roads, engineers who persist in designing roads for cars, and the oil and gas industries vs environmentalists who have been letting us know that emissions are killing the planet, and urban planners who realize that streets should be designed as places for people and that #slowthecars will save thousands of lives each year. Cities designed with alternative transportation options are more livable – healthier and safer.

OF ALL THE PROBLEMS OUR CITIES NEED TO FIX, LACK OF CAR PARKING ISN’T ONE OF THEM

May 16, 2019

“…cars dominate our cities, supported by decades of unbalanced planning decisions favouring space for cars over other land uses or forms of transport. “

Car parking is such a pervasive feature of our cities that we have become blind to how much space it takes up.

“Finally, providing more housing options without rigidly attached parking spaces will encourage people who don’t actually need to drive to choose to drive less or switch to other forms of transport.”

Rx BIKES

Asbury Park has a successful bike share program. We hope that it’s going to be used even more in every neighborhood in the city as a viable option for alternative transportation. It may be possible that even more people can be encouraged to use bike share if it’s prescribed as a health benefit, and if the bike share cost is waived. In countries all over the world bikes are an important mode of transportation, and the health benefits in those countries are measurable. Doctors in NJ are prescribing gym memberships and wellness programs and fees are reduced or waived, so could doctors in our area begin to utilize bike share as a health prescription?

Take Two Bike Rides and Call Me in the Morning: Cycling as Doctor’s Orders

By Palko Karasz May 10, 2019

London’s bike-rental program has proved popular. Now, patients at two medical centers in Cardiff, Wales, will be offered six-month subscriptions to a bike-rental service, with free rides of up to 30 minutes.

LONDON — A new program in Wales will allow family doctors to offer patients an unusual prescription for better health: bicycles.

“…six-month subscriptions to a bike-rental service that allows them to make unlimited free rides of up to 30 minutes at a time, and officials hope to expand the program.

“For the first phase of the pilot, we want to make sure the scheme works as intended and is easy to use for patients and their health professionals…”

Read and ride:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/10/world/europe/uk-prescription-bikes.html

April 29, 2019April 29, 2019

Crackdown On People Riding Bikes?

City officials and law enforcement (and the rest of us) have been taken in by the auto industry for a long time…so long and so effectively that we are influenced that people on bikes (in this case kids on bikes) are so dangerous to elicit a statement like the one in this this blog post. Terms like “plan of attack”, eradicate”, and “crackdown” applied to kids on bikes should make us all afraid. There is a terrible problem with prioritizing cars over people in this country. This is where our focus should be: In 2017 there were 5,977 pedestrians and 783 bicyclists killed in crashes with motor vehicles in the United States.

FIT IS A FEMINIST ISSUE

Kids riding bikes aren’t renegades or miscreants– officials should watch their language!

“We are all people riding bikes, no matter what we are wearing, what bike we are riding, or how fast or slow or far we are going. I, for one, take on different cycling identities depending on which bike I’m on, what I’m wearing, and where I’m going. What’s important is that the community (especially those behind the wheel of a car) see my humanity regardless. We can start by calling me what I am– a person who rides a bike.”

Though we may tie our identity to our bike riding styles, in reality we’re just people who bike. We are people who bike fast, people who slow roll, people who bike in the woods, people who bike in spandex, people who bike in nothing (um, World Naked Bike Ride!), and people who ride in groups to blow off steam. This may be obvious but it must be stated: Even among all the tribalism in bicycling culture, we are all just people riding bikes.

Read about it.

https://fitisafeministissue.com/2019/04/28/kids-riding-bikes-arent-renegades-or-miscreants-officials-should-watch-their-language/

April 25, 2019April 23, 2019

Cars Ruin Our Lives

Patients in any American hospital might be ill as a result of air pollution, suffering from lung issues or asthma. In the orthopedic department, patients are being treated for injuries due to car crashes, or suffering from neck, back, hip and knee issues after a lifetime of inactivity. Diabetes, hypertension, and diseases related to obesity are directly related to sedentary lifestyle as people travel in cars rather than walking or riding bikes. Cars not only make us sick, they also destroy community. The amazing variety of ways in which cars have ruined our lives is striking, and yet we have accepted it – because we’ve been duped by the industry into thinking that we can’t live without cars. “Yes, the car is still useful – for a few people it’s essential. It would make a good servant. But it has become our master, and it spoils everything it touches. It now presents us with a series of emergencies that demand an emergency response.”

Cars are killing us. Within 10 years, we must phase them out

George Monbiot Opinion Transport policy

Driving is ruining our lives, and triggering environmental disasters. Only drastic action will kick our dependency

‘Transport should be planned. This means a wholesale switch to safe and separate bike lanes.’ Photograph: Tim Ireland/PA

Pollution now kills three times as many people worldwide as Aids, tuberculosis and malaria combined. Remember the claims at the start of this century, projected so noisily by the billionaire press: that public money would be better spent on preventing communicable disease than on preventing climate breakdown? It turns out that the health dividend from phasing out fossil fuels is likely to have been much bigger. (Of course, there was nothing stopping us from spending money on both: it was a false dilemma.) Burning fossil fuels, according to a recent paper, is now “the world’s most significant threat to children’s health”.

There are also subtler and more pervasive effects. Traffic mutes community, as the noise, danger and pollution in busy streets drive people indoors. The places in which children could play and adults could sit and talk are reserved instead for parking.

Should Protected Bike Lanes Be Mandatory?

Asbury Park is on it’s way to becoming a model city with a focus on people instead of cars. The Plan for Walking and Biking is a comprehensive plan to build infrastructure throughout the city to enable people to get around. We have a perfect grid design in much of the city, and in the rest of the city, even in neighborhoods with narrower diagonal streets, Asbury Park is still better situated to planning and implementing infrastructure for people over cars than most cities. We’re headed in the right direction thanks to a forward thinking transportation manager, and envisioned in our Bike Walk Master Plan…but can we go even further and implement protected bike lanes all over the city? We hear often that it’s a marathon, not a sprint in planning and design for a city, but we NEED to acknowledge all over the US that cars are destined to be obsolete, and must be replaced with more environmentally stable mobility options – sooner than later.

Cambridge Becomes First U.S. City to Make Protected Bike Lanes Mandatory

By Angie Schmitt Apr 9, 2019

The Boston-area city of Cambridge is poised to become one of the most-progressive safe-biking cities in the country, thanks to the passage of a bill requiring protected bike lanes on all city streets.

The “Cycling Safety Ordinance” requires city streets to be upgraded to include the safest bike paths whenever a roadway is reconstructed. Advocates hope it to secure a 20-mile network of protected bike lanes in five years for the city of 113,000.

Read about it:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/04/09/cambridge-becomes-first-u-s-city-to-make-protected-bike-lanes-mandatory/?fbclid=IwAR3M1e8wOsQ0HYFfMIBj-7wOIL09df9eJrKDV7Pxvk8J8x2-6CnAAw4DCLo

April 23, 2019April 27, 2019

What’s An LPI? Pedestrians First!

Correction!

Although APCSC advocates for LPIs-

Unfortunately Asbury Park Main Street redesign does NOT include LPIs. Main ST is NJ 71, a state highway, and NJDOT engineers are not including LPIs in the traffic lights, although they are recommended by the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

Drivers have been injuring and killing people walking, and people on bikes at an increasing rate. Mixing people with cars is a bad combination. #slowthecars #toomanycars

Canadian cities are grappling with the same issues that we are here in the US. Speed kills, and there are too many cars. One way to make streets safer for people is the traffic signal that lets people cross before drivers are permitted to go, called an LPI, Leading Pedestrian Interval. (There are also LBIs in many cities, which allow people on bikes to go first.) Asbury Park will experience the benefit of LBIs at intersections when the Main Street reconfiguration is completed.

‘We need to implement this everywhere’

Critic calls for installation of LPIs, which give head start to pedestrians at crosswalks

Joel Ballard · CBC News · Posted: Apr 11, 2019

LPIs give pedestrians a head start

LPIs give pedestrians a three to seven second head start when entering an intersection. The vehicles’ traffic signal stays red for a few extra seconds while pedestrians begin to cross.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/we-need-to-implement-this-everywhere-is-vancouver-dragging-its-heels-on-pedestrian-safety-1.5093227

April 22, 2019April 22, 2019

No Surprise Here: Protected Bike Lanes Are Best

It’s not like we didn’t already know this. Protected bike lanes are the BEST way to provide safe access on streets for people on bikes. What we didn’t know is that drivers pass CLOSER to people in painted bike lanes. We’re not fans of sharrows, and we don’t advocate no markings on streets – although by law, bike riders are allowed to take the lane, even if there is a bike lane. In many situations it’s safer to ride in the lane with traffic, such as when there’s debris in the bike lane, or if the rider is in danger of being hit by a car door opening. So what’s the solution? We need protected bike lanes everywhere that infrastructure can be built so that bike riders are not marginalized and endangered. potentially inured and killed.

Study: Driver Behavior Shows Greater Need for Protected Bike Lanes

By Angie SchmittApr 15, 2019

A stripe of paint on the street isn’t enough to keep bicyclists safe from drivers, a new study confirms.

The study, published this month in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention, analyzed the way drivers interact with cyclists on various types of streets. It found that drivers pass cyclists on average about 1.25 feet closer on streets with a painted bike lane and car parking than on streets with no bike infrastructure.

“When the cyclist and driver share a lane, the driver is required to perform an overtaking maneuver,” Dr. Ben Beck, Monash University’s Deputy Head of Prehospital, Emergency and Trauma Research and the lead researcher on the study, said in a statement. “This is in contrast to roads with a marked bicycle lane, where the driver is not required to overtake. This suggests that there less of a conscious requirement for drivers to provide additional passing distance.”

Read about it:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2019/04/15/study-painted-bike-lanes-endanger-cyclists-more/

April 18, 2019April 19, 2019

Road Diet Support From Tri City News!

Pick up a copy of Tri City today!

Big thanks to Dan Jacobsen Publisher of Tri City News for an in-depth, informative, and supportive article about the reconfiguration of Main Street.

Part of the article quoted from Polli Schildge, APCSC committee member:

As you drive on Main Street, “traffic calming” is what you’re experiencing. It’s the driver response to a street that feels narrower, and where there’s a need to be more aware. Drivers seem to have adapted, and they’re driving more safely, even though it isn’t pretty. Right now Main Street is in the process of repair, with obstacles like barrels, trucks, and potholes which “calm” traffic. When the project is finished there will be a calmer flow of traffic, because of only one north and one south lane, bike lanes, and a center turning lane. Drivers will find that they’re getting to their destinations without losing time, and without needing to zoom traffic light to traffic light.

Scroll down for more…

More…

A small city like Asbury Park is perfectly positioned to implement infrastructure like the Main Street Road Diet, and to adopt The Asbury Park Plan for Walking and Biking, which Doug references. We’re at #peakcar. #toomanycars. With bikeshare, jitneys, electric cars, and other transit options Asbury Park can be a model city for getting around safely walking, biking, and with or…without a car.

For many years, much of the focus in engineering city streets has been how to efficiently move cars. Asbury Park is among other forward thinking cities globally where we’ve realized that safety, and PEOPLE should be the focus. Cars are often needed to get to destinations, but within the city there are much better, healthier, and safer ways to get around, especially for many residents who do not own cars at all.

We’re so fortunate to have Transportation Manager, Mike Manzella and advocate members in Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition who can help educate, and partner with residents, businesses and police to make this city truly walkable and bikeable.

Stay tuned for more ways in which Asbury Park will be creating better ways for people to move about the city without a car.