In this time of massive unemployment and government spending, it’s great to know that building bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure creates more jobs than other infrastructure spending (because it’s less automated).
Perhaps more importantly, creating a safe way to bike and walk places improves health, reduces pollution and improves the local economy, since people who bike and walk to shopping buy more frequently.
Drivers in the US are attracted to huge SUVs and trucks party because fuel prices are so low, and mostly as a result of the brainwashing effect of the automotive industry advertising the feeling of personal empowerment and freedom. The industry has slowed or stopped production of less-profitable sedans and focused on bigger vehicles with higher margins, so they sell the truck drug to willing consumers. This article from 2005 from The University of Rochester describes ads for SUVs and trucks triggering an emotional response with the promise of liberation and freedom. The names of vehicles like Ford’s Discovery and Freelander, Subaru’s Forester and Outback, Ford’s Excursion, Expedition and Escape evoke the All-American love of wilderness and exploration. The names of these giant vehicles conjure up the great American outdoors, while disregarding the negative environmental impact, as described in 2006 in this article from The University of Colorado Center Science and Policy.
The SUV Durango Hellcat is marketed in this ad, driving on a completely empty road in the middle of nowhere, as a “family” SUV (a family vehicle named Hellcat??), with top speed of 180 mph and 0-60 in 3.5 seconds. The reality is that these are death vehicles operating in our cities and suburbs.
Tall front grills will more likely kill a pedestrian by striking at chest level, or crushing an unseen child, than a sedan, which would strike at leg level.
As a result of these statistics, citing “U.S. vehicle safety standards are much lower than those permitted for vehicles sold in the U.K.”, experts in the United Kingdom are urging their government to ban import of American-made SUVs.
The UK is considering banning American SUVs and Trucks deeming them too dangerous,. Will the US follow suit and eliminate them from American streets? Doubt it.
Everyone deserves to have safe streets to access work, businesses, and recreation, especially now when we need more space to move about our cities with appropriate social distance without risk of vehicular traffic.
Asbury Park ReOPEN, a pilot which currently runs Thursdays through Monday mornings, is helping businesses to generate revenue with restriction of capacity, mask requirements, distancing, and limited hours. Separately, “Slow Streets” will be set up on various streets in the city, where vehicular traffic will be limited to local only, allowing residents to move about safely on the street playing, bicycling, walking, and rolling without risk from cars and trucks.
Many cities across the US and the world have implemented these measures, including in CA, TX, KY, OH, MA, and many more. Jersey City’s Slow Streets pilot program is 24/7, described here:
Due to the Covid-19 safety measures, the City of Jersey City is working to provide residents additional open space that supports safe physical activity by designating certain streets throughout the City as “Slow Streets”. These streets will be closed to through traffic so that people can more comfortably use them for physically distant walking, wheelchair rolling, jogging, biking and exercising all across the City.
Enjoy the following blog post and photos from a visitor to Asbury Park’s Business District.
Stay tuned for continued adaptations to the program in neighborhoods all over the city, and upcoming implementation and photos from Slow Streets in Asbury Park. We welcome your thoughts and constructive comments.
Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition supports a reallocation of police resources, specifically of traffic enforcement, and also in calls involving mental illness, homelessness, and other non-criminal issues where other professionals can be of much more effective service. Since the early 1920’s the often violent consequences of policing traffic has been borne mostly by people of color. You’ll read below how our roads have become over policed, and how Berkeley, California is “de-copping” traffic enforcement.
To fully understand the history of the policing of American roads, take a listen to this great War On Cars Podcast:
“For a century, the automobile has been sold to Americans as the ultimate freedom machine. In her groundbreaking new book, “Policing the Open Road,” historian and legal scholar Sarah Seo explodes that myth. Seo shows how modern policing evolved in lockstep with the development of the car. And that rather than giving Americans greater freedom, the massive body of traffic law required to facilitate mass motoring helped to establish a kind of automotive police state. Is a car a private, personal space deserving Fourth Amendment protection from “unreasonable searches and seizures?” Or is a car something else entirely? It’s a question that courts have struggled with for decades, ultimately leaving it up to the police to use their own discretion, often with horrifying results, especially for minorities. In this revelatory conversation with TWOC co-host Aaron Naparstek, Seo offers an entirely new way of looking at the impact of the automobile on American life, law and culture.”
“The overpolicing of cars is a fact of life for people of color in the United States.”
“In their book In Context: Understanding Police Killings of Unarmed Citizens, scholars Nick Selby, Ben Singleton, and Ed Flosi concluded, “No form of direct government control comes close to [traffic] stops in sheer numbers, frequency, proportion of the population affected, and in many instances, the degree of coercive intrusion.”
To learn about Berkeley, CA becoming the “first in the United States to take police officers out of traffic enforcement, read this Streetsblog USA article:
“Racism in street safety law enforcement, of course, is not unique to Berkeley — and some street safety advocates hope that their own cities will consider similar proposals.”
This NYTIMES article, filled with great graphics and data has evoked many responses from readers, and inspired other opinion pieces like this from StreetsBlog.
What are your thoughts about minimizing or eliminating automobiles in Asbury Park? How do you envision our city in 2 years, 5 years, or 10? We know that real estate has been strong, even during the pandemic, and gradually we will see more condos built on iStar’s lots, meaning more people, and undoubtedly more cars, unless we start now to mitigate car use and parking availability. Within the past couple of weeks traffic we’ve seen traffic escalate back to pre pandemic congestion in the business district and waterfront. Drivers are speeding in every neighborhood in the city.
APCSC believes in a walkable, bikeable, livable Asbury Park where everyone, especially the most vulnerable can access every part of the city without the dangers associated with motor vehicles.
“Automobiles are not just dangerous and bad for the environment; they are also profoundly wasteful of the land around us, taking up way too much physical space to transport too few people. It’s geometry.
In most American cities, wherever you look, you will see a landscape constructed primarily for the movement and storage of automobiles, not for the enjoyment of people: endless wide boulevards and freeways for cars to move swiftly; each road lined with parking spaces for cars at rest; retail establishments ringed with spots for cars…”
It’s a critical time to address how bicycling and biking infrastructure impact People Of Color in Asbury Park. Everyone deserves safe access through neighborhoods, and many people in the city ride bikes and walk as their main ways of getting around. So while we need to continue to create safe ways for people to move about the city, we also need to address the fear that the correlation of bike lanes and gentrification will lead to displacement . The city is currently following the Plan for Walking and Biking, created in 2018, gradually adding bike lanes, sidewalks, and intersection bump outs, and it is critical that we engage now and listen to how this infrastructure affects People Of Color in our city, and seek to mitigate negative impacts.
Girl cycles behind people on the street in San Francisco, California. Locals ride the closed streets once a month on a Sunday., Image: 98680003, License: Rights-managed, Restrictions: , Model Release: no, Credit line: Adam Gasson / Alamy / Profimedia
While we continue to advocate for biking, and we’re putting in bicycle lanes and other infrastructure to make Asbury Park a more vibrant and livable city, we may have also played an unwitting role in the gentrification of our city. Listen to the excellent interview with Stehlin here.
Asbury Park Complete streets Coalition advocates for a city that provides equitable access for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
This webinar (see the video below) addresses:
the overall benefits of creating places that are equitable, walkable and transit-oriented
how zoning and other policy interventions affect the form, development and diversity of the built environment
creative ways for providing and sustaining transit services in diverse communities
first- and last-mile access to public transportation
opportunity zones and the funding and financing opportunities that are available for equitable development projects and activities through public and private programs and partnerships
how to build political will for equitable transit-oriented development
Equitable Transit-Oriented Development
Watch a video webinar presented by Smart Growth America
An illustration shows that equality is giving the same bicycle to each person. Equity is giving each person a bicycle that’s suitable to their size and ability.
“When we think about community development, transportation investments, as well as community engagement, too often the conversation is around how we take one specific policy and apply it to all communities and diverse populations,” Christopher Coes explains in this training webinar, hosted by AARP Livable Communities.
That is done, he adds, “without truly understanding how those populations, whether vulnerable or senior citizens, have their own unique challenges and require specific resources for them to be successful.”
In the equity space, land use decisions and transportation investments need to, Coes notes, “be applicable to all citizens where they are.”
We have much to learn as we work to create a city for people, by taking antiracist action in the built environment. We must:
Acknowledge that equity is a matter of life and death — not an “add-on”.
Center Black communities in transportation planning.
Honor Black anger.
‘Centering Equity is a Matter of Life and Death’: Responding to Anti-Black Racism in Urbanism
Five visionary leaders shared their wisdom on how to take antiracist action in the built environment professions. Here are a few of the highlights for Streetsblog readers.
By Kea WilsonThe event followed a CUI panel earlier this month that attracted more than 2,000 live viewers and went viral on Twitter. (Streetsblog Chicago’s Courtney Cobbs recapped it here.) The response was so resounding that the Institute brought back the panelists for a follow-up — with an emphasis on helping practitioners take meaningful antiracist action.1. Equity is a matter of life and death — not an “add-on”Many street-safety movements historically have focused so heavily on the dangers of car traffic that they’ve failed to recognize other major safety threats — such as racialized violence against Black people — as barriers to the safe use of public space. Jay Pitter, CUI senior fellow, underscored this failure elegantly when she reminded viewers of how such supposedly “neutral” urban-planning policies as land use zoning, transportation planning and architecture have been used to oppress, brutalize, kill, and destroy intergenerational wealth among BIPOC communities.
“Centering equity isn’t just a nice thing to do. It’s a matter of life and death,” Pitter said. “None of us [in the built environment professions] have clean hands. We are not working in a pure profession. What we need to do now is work actively to mitigate gaps.”
When it comes to mobility, advocates stress that real justice starts with the simple recognition that centering equity is integral to street safety — and not, as some Vision Zero chapters have claimed, an optional sixth “E” in Vision Zero’s “five E’s” framework for achieving zero roadway deaths. (The other 5 E’s are Enforcement, Education, Engagement, Encouragement, and Evaluation, with the sixth and seventh E’s of Equity and Engagement considered to be “encouraged” but not integral to the framework among some Vision Zero groups.)
2. Center Black communities in transportation planning
Planners must fundamentally rethink their profession in order to center the lived experiences of Black communities who are affected by planning projects — rather than paternalistically assuming that they know what the community needs.
Tamika Butler of Toole Design described an incident when a client could have fallen prey to that trap, but chose another path. The Los Angeles Department of Transportation had contracted with Toole to engage a predominantly Black community in a scooter project, but quickly found that the community didn’t want to discuss scooters — because it had other, more urgent government priorities.
“[You have to] acknowledge that the work you’re doing is not guided by you,” Butler said. “If you’re going say, ‘we’re going to talk to communities,’ you’re going to have to listen to communities. And you have to be willing to listen with curiosity…You have to be able to say, well, why don’t you want to talk about scooters? Tell me what else is going on?”
Butler said that, sometimes, those conversations will lead to different projects than the practitioner may have initially envisioned — which is a good thing. In the case of LADOT, she says, they were open to switching focus, which helped the agency better meet community needs.
“Decision makers, you have to be open to pivoting,” Butler said. “[City agencies] can’t just use [planning consultants contracted to perform community engagement work] to check a box, and if we tell you that people aren’t really talking about [your scooter program], use that as an excuse to say, ‘well, I’ll never hire you again, you didn’t get what I wanted.’ We got you what you needed. You have to know the difference between what you want and what you actually might need.”
3. Honor Black anger
Several panelists touched on their peers’ surprise that Black communities express anger in community-engagement sessions and other interactions with their government — even though government institutions have a long and well-documented history of harming those communities.
“We have to stop being so scared as practitioners of being cussed out and having high-energy conflicts and tensions in these meetings. Let it happen!” said Orlando Bailey of BridgeDetroit and the Urban Consulate of Detroit, Mich. “[There are] systemic forces that traumatize residents in the city of Detroit. That trauma has to show up somewhere. We need to make room for it.”
Bailey gave the example of a planning study he lead on the Lower East Side of Detroit, which made room for residents to voice their trauma and for planners to understand and translate that anger into meaningful change. The conversations were so intense that a three-month contract ultimately lasted two years — enabling his group to address a much wider range of local problems than the study initially anticipated.
It’s not hard to imagine how allowing more space, time and support for Black communities to express their concerns — and express their rage — could turn transportation projects into tools for restorative justice, rather perpetuating harms.
The bicycle has been an active player in social justice activism for decades, and the inequity in the treatment of people riding bikes has been documented through history. Adolf Hitler’s in 1933 criminalized cycling unions. In 1989 demonstrators in China poured into Tiananmen Square on bicycles, and then flattened frames and wheels were left behind after tanks moved in.
During Black Lives Matter protests bikes are being confiscated. When a curfew is enforced people walking and on bikes are targeted, while people in cars are permitted to drive. A disturbing recent twist has emerged, and as advocates for police on bikes in Asbury Park, we are horrified by images of bicycles being used by police in some cities as weapons against protesters.
As APCSC continues to advocate for safe bicycling infrastructure, we know that a rise in real estate values often accompanies biking and walking improvements. Although it is not causal, there is a reluctance on the part of residents to embrace bicycling and walking improvements for fear of gentrification. We must be energized to address affordable housing and retain residents while creating safe environment for people to move about the city. There are millions of every day bike riders and walkers – people who don’t own cars – who deserve better, equitable access to jobs and school. “Invisible riders” is a term describing the marginalization of black, brown, female, and working-class cyclists, illustrating that t
In fact, you could say that Black Lives Matter is a moral crusade about freedom of movement and who is at liberty to go where. For generations, police departments have patrolled African-American neighborhoods like occupying armies, surveilling and circumscribing the movements of residents, who are treated as interlopers even on their home turf. The mobility of black people is additionally restricted by a system that construes their mere presence in many public spaces as trespassing, a de-facto crime, punishable by imprisonment or even death.
Tensions over freedom of movement are ratcheted up during times of civil unrest. In the past two weeks, the streets of American cities have become ferociously contested terrain. Protesters chant “Whose streets? Our streets!”; police impose their authority with weapons and barricades.
ASBURY PARK OPENS STREETS FOR PEOPLE…Let’s do it every day.
Polli Schildge, Editor, June 16th, 2020
In a bold move Asbury Park showed support for restaurants by passing a resolution at last week’s council meeting to “permit restaurants to host diners inside at 25% of the building’s capacity or 50 people, whichever is fewer”. This was an interpretation of Governor Murphy’s Executive Order No. 152 and Executive Order No. 150, allowing establishments to open with limited capacity indoors.
The city backed off as reported in ABC6 Philadelphia, after the state sued on Friday and a judge issued an order temporarily blocking the town’s attempt to allow indoor dining. “Mayor John Moor and the council released a statement Friday evening recommending that restaurants not serve diners indoors”, and as described in The Patch, Asbury Park is providing space for businesses and restaurants to operate outdoors starting on Monday, June 15th.
To provide space for people to walk and dine safely, the City Council has announced ReOPEN Asbury Park : Business & Community Recovery Strategy Plan. Streets in the business district and other select streets will be open for walking, dining, bicycling, and other recreation from Thursday through Sunday.
Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition applauds the city in this forward-thinking approach to providing space for people to move through the the city with social distancing, and for businesses to begin recoup revenue, described at 94.3 The Point. However opening streets only Thursday through Sunday is not enough. We suggest that the ReOPEN Plan provides open streets 7 days a week. On Monday evening, June 15th, the first day that restaurants were permitted to serve outdoors, sidewalks along Cookman Ave. were packed with diners and walkers, while cars cruised on the street as drivers circled and idled waiting for parking. The sidewalks are simply not wide enough. A huge swath of the business district is covered in asphalt, and dominated by cars – space which could be utilized for safely distanced dining and walking. Restaurant and business owners are supportive of the plan, acknowledging that residents and business patrons will appreciate the ability to access city streets without having to dodge cars.
Asbury Park ReOPEN Plan outlines opening streets for people and restricting access to cars Thursdays through Sundays. The plan will:
1. Expand capacity for restaurant, retail and services
2. Utilize public space as a mechanism to allow people to maintain social distancing
3. Provide opportunities for residents to safely enjoy their neighborhoods
New cars in the United Kingdom are required to meet advanced
