Tag: sidewalks

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Survey: How are you getting around in Asbury Park, and in Monmouth County?

Have you seen or encountered obstacles to getting around in Asbury Park, or in your city in Monmouth County?

The Monmouth County Division of Planning, Transportation and Community Services hosted an open house on Thursday, Nov. 16 asking for feedback to improve mobility throughout Monmouth County.

An interactive mapping tool that let’s you easily pick and comment on places that need imorovement: It only takes a few minutes to do it!

This open house was the first public event for Monmouth Paths Access For All, a transportation study that will evaluate existing barriers to mobility and recommend strategies to achieve equitable mobility,

We look forward to seeing the results and next steps to improving access for everyone to get around our county and Asbury Park!

Here are some obstacles we’ve experienced in Asbury Park:

 

#NJDOTengineering: 4 intersections in Asbury Park’s Main St. include raised concrete corner wedges for zero purpose. Trip hazards, so they painted the edges yellow. Still trip hazards, so they came back again and glued on plastic flex posts, which have almost all fallen off. Can these meaningless chunks of concrete be removed?
No purpose for these weird blocky corners. Notice here, one flex post is gone. That was months ago. Now ALL of them have fallen off.
If you’re a bike rider, what does it mean when you see a sign like this “bike lane ends”? What does it mean to drivers? Whose interest is being served with this kind of signage?
If you drive around the Asbury/Neptune circle heading north and west, you might never notice this overgrown sidewalk. If you have to walk along that sidewalk, it’s dangerous, disappearing under encroaching weeds, and unlit, dangerous at night.
If you’re a person on a bike coming off the Ocean Grove bridge toward Lake Ave you’ll see that the concrete path does not lead to the ramp to the street, so people on bikes have created a “desire path” to get to the ramp, although a dirt path isn’t the safest place to ride a bike.. How could the city improve this situation? Moving the ramp could be a good solution.
NJDOT/NJTransit One of 2 closed railroad crossings in Asbury Park. It has eliminated a access for people who live in that neighborhood to get home, or to destinations in the city, and collected debris and trash.
NJDOT Confusing instructions on Main St. in Asbury Park for pedestrians to cross the street, especially for non-Engllsh speakers. Our streets should not prioritize drivers above other road users.
No curb ramps on 5th Ave in Asbury Park to roll a wagon with kids, or a stroller, or for anyone with a handicap.

We need your help to understand the mobility challenges you encounter (or that you observe) when travelling to work, school, healthcare appointments, shopping, or whenever you’re walking or rolling in Monmouth County.

Whether you drive, take public transportation, walk, bike, or use another mode of transportation, you might notice or encounter mobility barriers, such as in these photos, or traffic congestion, unsafe intersections, infrequent bus service, no bus shelters, missing sidewalks or ADA curb ramps, no bike parking, etc.

It’s easy!  Use the online mapping tool to identify and comment on places with mobility obstacles in Monmouth County that you’ve noticed, or experienced yourself.

The information you provide will be vital to informing the Monmouth Path Study, a transportation planning study that will identify and develop measures to reduce or eliminate mobility barriers for Monmouth County residents.

The goal of this study is to provide guidance for the County and its municipalities to reduce or overcome existing barriers and prevent new obstacles. This will be accomplished by combining data analysis and the lived experiences of County residents to evaluate infrastructure, policy, socioeconomic, and awareness factors that can be major limitations for the traveling public. Potential outcomes of this study include strategies to improve the built environment in a variety of land-use areas within the County.

Onward~

Polli Schildge

Editor, APCSC

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The 99% Invisible Built Environment Around Us

For most of my life I paid almost no attention to the design of the built environment around me. As a person walking, riding a bike, and driving, plus teaching 6 children to navigate their neighborhood on foot, on bikes, and cars, I moved about in my world – using streets and sidewalks without taking much notice of the actual design of crosswalks, or striping of lanes.

This changed dramatically when I became involved in the issue of a road reconfiguration in Asbury Park. Suddenly, clarity! I began to notice every detail of the design of the city, and the ways that people utilize the infrastructure that exists around them. What had been invisible to me is probably invisible to most people who move through their days to school, work, recreation…and it’s been planned to function that way.  I began to notice how much of my (any) city, or suburb is devoted to the level of service for motor vehicles, and street storage (aka parking). I researched city and suburban planning and design, and learned that automotive industry titans were the major players in the early 20th century in get everyone into cars, and the rest is history. Over the course of time we’ve been conditioned to use, but not to notice design around us.

Recommended listening: 99% Invisible Podcast, and the following article about the new book, The 99 Percent Invisible City: a Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, reveals the secret history of urban errata around the world and on your own block.

‘A City is a Series of Choices Over Time’: Roman Mars Reveals the Secret Histories That Shape Our Streets

By Kea Wilson

For over 10 years, the “99 Percent Invisible” podcast has been a touchstone for anyone interested in the often-overlooked design choices that shape our world — and particularly, the auto-centric design choices that shape our streets. More than 400 million downloads later, host Roman Mars collaborated with producer Kurt Kohlstedt to co-author The 99 Percent Invisible City: a Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design, which reveals the secret history of urban errata around the world and on your own block.

From the surprising insights that gave the jersey barrier its curves to the bizarre crash that lead to the invention of the roadway centerline, the stories in its pages inspire us to give the everyday a second look — and realize how profoundly our streets can be remade by simple design choices, no matter the violent history that may have built them.

We talked with Mars about his new book, and why wonder might be the missing ingredient in the fight to end traffic violence.

From the interview:

“I think it all comes from the relatively recent concept that streets are for cars, so there’s no reason to look at them any closer. And of course, that’s a relatively recent narrative, and it was consciously created by the powerful voices of motordom. For centuries, our streets were a truly multimodal and multipurpose space: they had pedestrians and trolleycars and horses and vendors and all these things, until we ceded that territory a hundred years ago to the automobile. We’re just now starting to figure out what we lost when we made that shift, and how to get it back.

What I’d most like people to do with the book is recognize that a city is a series of choices over time, and there is nothing inherent in a street that says that a car belongs on a road and a pedestrian only belongs on a sidewalk — or maybe at crosswalk, but only when the light changes. It wasn’t always that way, and we can modify it to be however we want it to be.”

Read more:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/12/11/a-city-is-a-series-of-choices-over-time-roman-mars-reveals-the-secret-histories-that-shape-our-streets/

 

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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 J

“…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/

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Why Do Scooter Riders Ride on Sidewalks?

Since the 1920s we’ve been conditioned to believe that roads are designed for cars (they weren’t). Traffic congestion and vehicular fatalities, plus the effects on health and climate has shown city leaders all over the world the need to modify/eliminate the use of motor vehicles, and build better infrastructure for bikes, walking and other modes of transit.

Enter scooters. We know that there’s a need for alternatives to driving, and scooter share is being introduced successfully as legitimate micro-mobility.  Although the rules in most cities require them to be ridden on the street, why are scooter riders on sidewalks?

Would you let your 10-year-old ride a bike or a scooter on a street with vehicular traffic moving at 25mph, 35mph, 45mph?  We need to design streets that are are safe for an 8-year-old to an 80-year-old. Let’s use that standard. Painted bike lanes are a start, but paint doesn’t protect.  Until we have protected bike/scooter lanes everywhere (and we will!) we need to continue to work on reducing/eliminating the need to drive in our city by providing as many alternative transportation options as possible #toomanycars, and meanwhile seriously slow vehicle speeds! #slowthecars.

Most scooter riders using the sidewalk are afraid of cars, new survey shows

By Taylor Stevens
 

“As Salt Lake City officials threaten to crack down on dockless e-scooter companies that don’t do enough to reduce the number of users riding on sidewalks, new data suggests solutions to the problem go beyond education efforts.

A survey conducted by Lime, one of four e-scooter companies currently operating within the city, found that the primary reason users say they’re not on the streets isn’t because they don’t know the rules but because they fear for their safety riding next to fast-moving cars.”

https://www.sltrib.com/news/politics/2019/10/15/most-scooter-riders-using/