Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition
Transportation Equity in Our City
There are a lot of Streetfilms resources for anyone who wants to get better bike lanes in their city!
START WITH A CORE OF DEDICATED VOLUNTEERS/COMMUNITY MEMBERS: You simply can’t do it without some very motivated people in your city wanting to help manage and motivate your neighbors (and eventually push back against the sure to come NIMBY naysayers) The video below shows how it is done.
Read and see more…
http://www.streetfilms.org/great-strategies-to-get-protected-bike-lanes-in-your-city/
Traffic crashes are the thirteenth most common cause of death in the United States, and the single leading cause of death for people aged eight to twenty-four. As with health care and gun violence, our record on road safety is now among the worst in the developed world, and it’s getting worse
“Everything we know from countries that have successfully reduced road deaths indicates that the most effective approach is to systematically redesign streets to prioritize safety over speed. The growing moral panic over being wired while walking takes none of this into account. Instead, Americans are increasingly being told that the solution is an arbitrary, punitive approach that has little evidence to back it up.
“Distracted pedestrian” laws aren’t really about the evidence, though. They are about maintaining the privileges of car culture as that culture is about to confront an enormous shift in the balance of civic and technological power—one that threatens to permanently upend the relationship between drivers and pedestrians.”
Read more…
“By 2060, if not before, the United States is expected to have twice as many people over 65 than today, rising to nearly 24% of the population. Will our cities be livable for them? Maybe so, if their leaders follow some of the ingenious and thoughtful ideas that sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders presented at the Future City regional competition I attended in Piscataway, N.J. on Saturday.
Future City is an annual, project-based learning experience from DiscoverE, a volunteer movement aiming “to inspire the next generation of engineers and innovators.” It starts with a question for middle schoolers: How can we make the world a better place?”
Read more…
THE ASBURY PARK HOUSING AUTHORITY & THE CITY OF ASBURY PARK
AN UNBOUNDED VISION FOR THE WEST SIDE NEIGHBORHOOD
EQUITABLE AND SUSTAINABLE…
Read more…
Lawmakers support slowing vehicle speeds and often emphasizes the need to enforce speed limits. In the interest of Vision Zero, all over the nation cities are implementing strategies like lowering speed limits and improved infrastructure to reduce and eliminate traffic fatalities, but enforcement too often disproportionately targets people of color. APCSC focuses on equity in transportation and we are aware that education must be a main component for success in safe streets for everyone.
“According to the Oregonian, commissioner Nick Fish said the new 20-mph policy was a good start, but should be paired with police enforcement.
“There’s a big education piece, and there’s a huge enforcement piece,” he said. “Some people are not getting the message right now.”
Increased police enforcement, however, is one of Vision Zero’s more controversial components. As Josh Cohen wrote for Next City in 2016:
Equity-minded safer streets advocates have criticized Vision Zero’s emphasis on traffic enforcement because people of color get stopped by police at disproportionate rates to white people (a problem prevalent in Portland). And, as the high-profile deaths of Philando Castile, Walter Scott, Terence Crutcher and many others illustrate, those traffic stops can escalate in fatal ways. So there is concern that Vision Zero traffic enforcement could have unintended consequences in communities of color.”
Read more…
Women all over the country make the decision to drive short distances rather than to walk, or they have no choice and walk on dangerous streets because infrastructure favors cars. Asbury Park is working on street design that can make it safe and convenient for women to walk, especially with children.
“Poor street design, disparate land use, time constraints, lack of personal safety—all of these conspire to force women off their feet and into cars. We have built a transportation system that discounts women’s travel needs, and women—and our communities—are suffering for it.
To understand what we should be doing better, it’s important to understand how women’s travel is different from men’s travel. Women make more trips than men, but travel shorter distances. They travel more with children, and their trips are more likely to be household-serving (e.g., shopping, daycare, errands), rather than for work or leisure. Women are also more likely to trip-chain (stop at multiple locations along the way during one trip). In particular for women with young children who haven’t started school, gender drives travel patterns.”
Read more…
http://www.wherethesidewalkstarts.com/2018/01/sexism-on-sidewalk-how-poor-street.html
Manzella [at right] said. “One thing we have learned is that compared to similar sized cities with the same program, we are knocking all but one of them out of the park.”http://asburyparksun.com/ap-bike-share-program-shows-higher-than-expected-return/
As Vox reports, the study’s authors attribute the U.S.’s high child mortality rate to its “fragmented” health care system, with insufficient preventative treatment due to lack of coverage and high childhood poverty rates in certain regions. Access to guns is highlighted as a “disturbing disparity” as teenagers are 82 timesmore likely to die from gun violence in the U.S.
But the motor vehicle deaths are cited as particularly preventable, because other countries are succeeding in preventing them, according to the study. Road fatalities have decreased universally over the last few decades due to campaigns targeting drunk driving and new safety innovations in cars.
Read more…
https://www.curbed.com/2018/1/10/16871152/traffic-deaths-children-vision-zero
Kate McKinnon of SNL parodies an auto industry lobbyist, Veronica Moss in this hilarious video. You may not recognize her (with dark hair) as she talks about her “land boat” (her Hummer), and murmurs sweet phrases to her Lincoln Navigator. She uses lines from car commercials as she strokes and kisses her SUV steering wheel…”there aren’t enough roads”!
For those of you new to @Streetfilms, Kate McKinnon has been in 3 of their films!
This article pairs with the previous article about Ford helping cities “take back the streets”: http://apcompletestreets.org/fords-mobility-service-platform-will-help-cities-take-back-their-streets
“We hear a lot about “vehicle-to-vehicle” (V2V) communication and “vehicle-to-everything” (V2X) communication. Cars with the right software can use cellular technology or a high-speed, low-latency medium called dedicated short-range communications (DSRC) to communicate with each other. This effort to connect our cars to each other and the world around them is part of a broader initiative to pave the way for the mass deployment of autonomous vehicles. But what about vulnerable groups like pedestrians and bicyclists?
WHAT ABOUT VULNERABLE GROUPS LIKE PEDESTRIANS AND BICYCLISTS?
Tome has partnered with Trek Bicycle to create an AI-based bicycle-to-vehicle (B2V) communication system to help drivers get alerts to bicycles ahead in dangerous areas of the road. Unlike existing cycling products, they focus on giving driver alerts, which is sure to appeal to the cycling community.”
Read more…
https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/9/16870614/ford-trek-tome-bicycle-to-vehicle-communication-ces-2018