Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition
Transportation Equity in Our City
Holiday Greetings, and a little bit of nostalgia. Cheers and safe travels on foot, on bikes, in cars, or on mass transit!
December 1942 @NewYorker; in the midst of wartime mobilization, gas/tire/steel rationing and the concomitant”Victory Bike” program, Americans were observed to be Christmas tree shopping by bike. No cars on the cover!
https://twitter.com/BikeBattlesBook/status/944249570070065152
Merry Christmas and happy holidays!
We may not have gas rationing, but what a lovely way to buy a Christmas tree.
December 1942 @NewYorker; in the midst of mobilization, gas rationing and “Victory Bike” program. US tree shopping by bike.
The Tesla CEO’s recent comments about public transportation triggered a firestorm of criticism. Here’s why.
Like many tech entrepreneurs, Elon Musk is trying to reinvent public transit. But his comments at an event last month, as reported by Aarian Marshall in Wired, made many people wonder whether he understands the business he’s trying to disrupt:
“I think public transport is painful. It sucks. Why do you want to get on something with a lot of other people, that doesn’t leave where you want it to leave, doesn’t start where you want it to start, doesn’t end where you want it to end? And it doesn’t go all the time.”
“It’s a pain in the ass,” he continued. “That’s why everyone doesn’t like it. And there’s like a bunch of random strangers, one of who might be a serial killer, OK, great. And so that’s why people like individualized transport, that goes where you want, when you want.”
Read more…
During this holiday season thousands of North Americans will be unnecessarily killed or severely injured in crashes. We could do much better!
The United States has the highest traffic fatality rate among peer countries, nearly three times the European average and easily twice the averages of Australia and Canada.
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APCSC wants to to provide bike lights for every bike rider in Asbury Park. You can help by donating to NJ Bike & Walk Coalition (NJBWC, our fiscal agent), which will allocate your tax-deductible gift to our Bike Light Campaign. Make your contribution here, and designate APCSC Bike Lights in the memo line:
http://apcompletestreets.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/Donation_form.pdf
Your contribution will make an impact, whether you donate $5 or $500. Every little bit helps to make Asbury Park a safer and healthier community.
Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition has been working since October 2015 to help make Asbury Park streets safer and equitable access for everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
Among our initiatives are better crosswalks, more visible and better-placed lights and stop signs, bike lanes, and speed limits, and the reconfiguration of Main Street. We are in collaboration with the city, and improvements of infrastructure are already underway.
At this time of year, days are shorter, and many people ride bikes in AP as their only transportation. We are planning educational events where we’d like to give away bike lights to every bike rider in Asbury Park. We have a resource for LED lights which we would like to purchase: red lights for the back of bikes, and white lights for the front.
Our goal is to light up all bikes in the city!
We all know that safe streets mean better neighborhoods, and with that in mind, we hope that you will consider helping us meet our goal of $2000 to purchase bike lights for all bicycle riders in Asbury Park.
Contributions made to New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition, NJBWC, will be allocated towards APCSC’s bike light drive.
Checks payable to NJBWC with APCC Bike Lights in the memo line.
Click to access Donation_form.pdf
The mission of the New Jersey Bike & Walk Coalition is to create a unified voice advocating for issues affecting the rights and needs of cyclists and pedestrians throughout the state.
There’s no other way to put it: This is failure. Epic failure. Someday as a profession and as a society, we will stop giving lip service to the concept of “Zero Fatalities” and make real change. I’m hoping it’s sooner than later.
Let’s take a look specifically at how we failed in this situation.
Read more…
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/12/15/traffic-engineers-epic-fail
We drive and drive and drive,
And there’s nobody out there to meet,
But the city comes alive
When I start walking on the street!
I’ll keep walking and never despair,
even if the sidewalks are bare.
I’m out looking for pedestrians to greet,
because my name is Pedestrian Pete!
Klineberg, the founding director of the Kinder Institute, called Brown “the personification of an engaged citizen.” Brown’s concerns were simultaneously practical and revolutionary. “Sometimes confrontational and controversial, he put his considerable energy and expertise to work in continually pushing Houston to develop into a more equitable, walkable, and attractive city,” said Klineberg.
Read more…http://urbanedge.blogs.rice.edu/2017/12/13/remembering-pedestrian-pete/#.WjQCa1unGEu
For decades, providing downtown parking was a top priority for urban planners. Huge parking garages for commuters’ cars occupied prime real estate that otherwise might have been used for housing, stores, or offices.
The bottom line: We’re going to need much less space to store cars. Some cities are gearing up to take advantage of the shift.
In addition, curbside parking will be redesigned. The National Association of City Transportation Officials suggests in a recent study that reuses could include bike parking, small green spaces, called “parklets,” for pedestrians to enjoy, and pickup and drop-off areas for driverless vehicles and ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft.
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Clarence Eckerson of StreetFilms calls snow “nature’s tracing paper”; you can see patterns of where people walk, bike and drive. In some cases, it acts as a “neckdown”, a curb extension that acts as a traffic calming device, forcing drivers to slow down. In City Rules, Emily Talen noted how these things work, how something as simple as the radius of the curb changes how pedestrians and drivers react: “As curve radii go from five feet to fifty, you get a completely different pattern and scale.”
The snow is doing what the traffic engineers won’t do: narrowing the streets, slowing people down. It’s showing the places drivers and people don’t go. It’s creating “snowy neckdowns” or sneckdowns.
Read more…
https://www.treehugger.com/urban-design/what-heck-sneckdown.html
Wherever you live, but especially in the suburbs, you can relate– there’s a mess of traffic around school at drop-off time in the morning. Think about riding your kids to school on your bike, with a kid seat, a trailer or any of the amazing other conveyances that are on the market to cart kids. Or better yet teach your kids how to ride safely when they are old enough to navigate your streets. Wave bye to them in the morning with helmets and lights, and if your city or town doesn’t have great cycling infrastructure, it might be time for you to join or start a Complete Streets movement.
Getting anywhere near a school with a car is a monumental pain in the ass.
If you enjoy driving to the airport, going to the mall on Black Friday, or the abject futility of automotive clusterfucks in general, then by all means, driving a kid to school is for you. If, however, you’d rather undergo colonoscopy prep than sit in traffic with a bunch of self-absorbed parents all competing to see who can get their little darlings closest to the entrance, then you’ll do anything to avoid the soul-crushing indignity of this dehumanizing ritual. So while I’m a cyclist and therefore choose to circumnavigate the whole shitshow by bike, the truth of the matter is that if bicycles didn’t exist, I’d probably be up on the roof of my building in a wingsuit and a BabyBjörn.
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