Finally, an update on an outdated document which can help prioritize people, especially the elderly

Hello readers,

Here’s wishing you all a healthy and happy holiday season and new year.

Feel free to scroll to the bottom to watch the BEST Christmas commercial EVER. We need to stay strong for every reason, and active living is the best way to do it.

🚲 🚶❤️🎄

But I do hope you’ll read through…!

The MUTCD has finally been updated after more than 100,000 suggestions for revisions from experts and advocates across the nation.

However moderate the changes may have been, it’s a better update than it would have been if people hadn’t spoken up.

Many people have no idea that this outmoded document has been responsible for the engineering of US streets and roads for decades, optimizing motor vehicle speeds, and leading to injuries and deaths of nearly 45,000 people each year, both inside and outside of vehicles.

“On Tuesday, the Federal Highway Administration finally published the 11th edition of what’s come to be known as the “notorious MUTCD,” marking the first time since 2009 that the agency has updated its official guidance on how to safely utilize the signs, signals and markings that annotate U.S. roads. In the intervening years, U.S. road deaths have shot up 26 percent, with pedestrians and fatalities skyrocketing 82 percent over the same period.”

The most important thing is that advocates demand that our local leadership deliver good street design.

If we don’t speak up, it won’t happen.

Safe design has been not been permitted within the constraints of the last edition of the MUTCD. Hopefully the new version will prioritize the movement of people over vehicles.

Baby Boomers are rapidly increasing in our population, and the belief is that as we age we’ll need more healthcare, more facilities for elderly, and more nurses and health aides. This may all be true, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s an industry like any other and we don’t have to be enriching it at the expense of our own health as we age.

We should build cities for the elderly.

To improve quality of life for the aging isn’t just about care that keeps them alive. It’s not just about length of life, but quality of life.

We need social settings that keep us all connected, active, and vital. People need to be able to move about their cities and towns – “active mobility”. It’s no secret that we can stay healthy and strong mentally and physically with regular daily exercise, and walking and biking are the easiest way to do it.

American city leaders should step up and design safe infrastructure, and public spaces to keep us all aging well.

Americans are aging. Cities that provide accessible, safe infrastructure to enable elderly to engage, also help them stay healthy.

Older people have the most to gain from equitable mobility options. And if cities ae designed for ages “8-80” they’re designed for everyone.

An aging population needs walkable, bikeable cities.

City leaders, and engineers, and planners incorrectly believe that elderly are more dependent on driving, assuming that they are losing physical ability to bike or walk longer distances. WRONG. Older people way too often resort to driving because they’ve been relegated to live in facilities like assisted living, or senior housing, which are inconveniently located away from services or businesses.

We all typically lose our ability to drive long before we lose the ability to walk.

“Only 60 percent of the American population can drive. Our automobile environments disenfranchise and endanger those who are physically unable or too young to drive, or too poor to own a car. The total number of non drivers is expected to increase dramatically as Baby Boomers age.”

Older Americans pedal for fun, health, transportation and to enjoy a stronger sense of community.

FACT: people can often ride a bike long into later years, even more easily than they can walk.

And here’s another benefit of bicycling for elderly: Gift article NYTimes: Cycling can make walking more efficient.

We need to design city streets for active, equitable transport for all people outside of cars, especially the elderly.

People who find it difficult to walk can often ride a bike with ease. Elderly need safe infrastructure to get around on bikes. If streets are designed for people “8-80” they are designed for everyone.

Let’s all make a commitment to speak up in 2024 to bring about change in our own city of Asbury Park, to prioritize people, and end driving culture.

Stay strong for every reason.

Watch: The BEST Christmas commercial.

Let me know if you think so too. ❤️

Onward~

Polli Schildge, Editor apcompletestreets.org

November 18, 2020November 18, 2020

Cars Should Not Own Our Cities

Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition has focused on making the city safer for everyone – streets that are safe for anyone “8 to 80″, in other words, for the most vulnerable. We have worked with the City Transportation Manager and gotten input from the community to create a Plan For Walking And Biking, an evolving plan, which now during the pandemic is adapting to include open streets and other methods of making streets more open to people walking and using micro-mobility, and less accommodating to cars. Cars should be guests in cities, not OWN cities.

Traffic must be slowed, and every effort needs to be made to reduce the need to drive, especially during the pandemic, when people are in need of safe spaces to be able to spend time outdoors for exercise, shopping, and dining.

We are intent upon creating a safe, healthy, and environmentally equitable city, not divided by city streets teeming with traffic.

In cities all over the US, “transportation issues negatively affect people of color” . Highways and roads that cut through, or over, Black, Latino, and immigrant neighborhoods.” Asbury Park’s Memorial Drive, train tracks, and our own Main Street have served to bisect the city into the east and west sides, and maintained the inequity of a city with a history of two faces. But now Main Street is currently nearing the end of a years long DOT reconfiguration, calming traffic and allowing people to walk and ride bikes for transportation and recreation, and a safer Memorial Drive is on the horizon.

Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition is committed to helping to build infrastructure that enables everyone to safely access the city on foot, a wheelchair, or on a bike or scooter, throughout this time of COVID, and beyond.

This Is Our Chance to Reclaim Cities from Cars

Joe Lindsey

Nov 17, 2020

The pandemic has led to an unexpected positive—people reclaiming streets in ways that have made urban America more bikeable, walkable, and enjoyable. Preserving that will take work, but it’s worth it.

“It’s callous to call a global pandemic an opportunity, but the crisis has altered our view of public spaces in ways no other event could. In Denver, which closed several streets to through traffic, that wouldn’t have happened without a catalyst. “If we had tried to roll this out pre-pandemic, we would have been met with opposition,” says Eulois Cleckley, executive director of the city’s Department of Transportation and Infrastructure. “But the situation people were placed in changed their perspective overnight.””

“For walking, cycling, and so-called micromobility options like scooters to really function as everyday transportation choices for more than just hardcore commuters…there has to be a safe route from anywhere in a city to anywhere else.”

Can We Create An 8-80 City?

What Does An “8-80” City Look Like?

Asbury Park is working on making city streets and sidewalks great public places, as well as focusing on sustainable mobility: walking, riding bicycles, scooters, and promoting other alternative mobility options, plus public transit.

Gil Penalosa, is founder of 8-80 Cities, grounded on the concept that we can create “vibrant cities with healthy communities where all people can live happier, regardless of age, gender, ability, or socio-economic or ethnic status.”

“The 8 to 80 litmus test involves imagining a public space, but especially a busy city street or intersection, and asking whether it is suitable for young and old alike.”

(Gil’s brother Enrique Penalosa, also a well-known urbanist, was re-elected mayor of Bogota Colombia in 2015 for the 2016–2019 term. While embroiled in some recent academic controversy, he has also been influential in making major improvements for people and places in that city during his 2 separate terms as mayor up to the present, and in other cities elsewhere in the world between terms.)

The 8 to 80 Problem: Designing Cities for Young and Old

How can cities create neighborhoods that work well for all generations?

John Lorinc Jan 18, 2012

“…in many aging societies, where the proportion of seniors will grow as much as four-fold over the next two decades, public space improvements alone won’t make large urban areas, especially car-dependent suburbs, more suitable to the needs of older residents. Indeed, one of the most difficult questions facing urban areas is how they will go about making themselves more age-friendly.”

Read about it~

https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2012/01/8-80-problem-designing-cities-young-and-old/959/