League Of American Bicyclists Instructor Seminar

News!

Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition will host a League Of American Bicyclists Cycling Instructor seminar on November 3rd, 4th, and 5th at The Boys And Girls Club.

Bicycling in Asbury Park has been transforming over the 8 years years that APCSC has been in existence.

When APCSC was founded there was only one (very worn) bike lane in the city.

People were riding bikes for daily transportation or recreation with zero awareness of the need for safe infrastructure. Main Street was a speeding 4 lane highway, many businesses had been abandoned, and drivers ruled city streets.

Locals began advocating with us and learning how we can #slowthecars with traffic calming measures like bike lanes, bumpouts, mini traffic circles, raised crosswalks, and speed bumps. The Main Street road diet was implemented after an energetic 18 months APCSC campaign.

Streets that are safe for anyone at any age to ride a bike will encourage people to ride bikes.

Residents and visitors now are beginning to understand the need for safe bike riding infrastructure – for health, economic, and social benefits.

We still have a long way to go, but improvements are being made all over the city. During these years people have become aware of the need for equitable mobility for the most vulnerable road users – which is everyone outside of a vehicle.

Take a look at the Asbury Park Plan For Walking And Biking, particularly beginning on page 63 to see plans for the current work on Memorial Drive!

Our hope is that we might be able to encourage parents, teachers, and residents to be a part of a “Bike Bus” – a global movement in which adults on bikes pick up kids on bikes at “bus stops” all over town and guide them to school.

Here’s a video of Montclair’s Bike Bus In action on a recent Friday with 163 kids. 143 adults!

And in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: Make Way for the Bike Bus. For the school commute, families are taking to the streets with two wheels. Some have termed the movement “kidical mass.”

This is where League of American Bicyclist Instructor training comes in!

The League Seminar will equip instructors to educate members of the community, particularly parents and school kids to ride bikes confidently and safely.

Certified LCIs are empowered to teach courses that cover youth riding, how to ride confidently and legally with traffic, how to share paths and trails, motorist education, bike handling, group riding, and more.

Membership in The League Of American Bicyclists and the Smart Cycling course are prerequisites. The courses are held throughout the year in locations all over the US.

For more information, email apcompletestreets@gmail.com if you’re interested in becoming a League Certified Instructor.

Onward~

Polli Schildge, Editor APCSC

November 14, 2022November 14, 2022

Traffic Calming: Everything You Need to Know About Roundabouts

Asbury Park is the recipient of funds to implement traffic calming methods on 3rd and 4th Avenues.

Some residents have been vocal about their objections to mini roundabouts, citing loss of parking. This is NOT true – the parking they fear losing is not legal within 25′ of the corner. Yellow daylighting paint now clearly indicates required parking distance away from the corners at the intersections.

APCSC is happy to discuss the best ways to help prevent speeding, which can include other treatments like raised crosswalks, and speed humps.

Stop signs and signals are not traffic calming methods

Don’t rely on enforcement to stop speeding

Take a look at the information below. As always, please feel free to reach out about proven ways to #slowthecars.

Onward~

Polli Schildge

APCSC Editor

Learn about roundabouts, including how to travel through them as a pedestrian, cyclist or driver.

PUBLIC OPINION

How Do You Feel About Roundabouts?

After driving roundabouts, the number of people who favor them more than doubles. A survey on drivers’ views of roundabouts before and after construction conducted by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) illustrates public opinion. Before construction, the number of drivers in favor of roundabouts was only 31 percent, and those strongly opposed was 41 percent. After driving them, this shifted to 63 percent in favor and only 15 percent strongly opposed.

Studies have shown that roundabouts are safer than traditional stop sign or traffic signal controlled intersections.

Roundabouts reduced injury crashes by 75 percent at intersections where stop signs or traffic signals were previously used for traffic control, according to a study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS). Studies by the IIHS and Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) have shown that roundabouts typically achieve:

A 37 percent reduction in overall collisions
A 75 percent reduction in injury collisions
A 90 percent reduction in fatality collisions
A 40 percent reduction in pedestrian collisions

National Association of City Transportation Officials Guide To Mini Roundabouts

Mini roundabouts and neighborhood traffic circles¹ lower speeds at minor intersection crossings and are an ideal treatment for uncontrolled intersections.

Mini roundabouts may be installed using simple markings or raised islands, but are best applied in conjunction with plantings that beautify the street and the surrounding neighborhood. Careful attention should be paid to the available lane width and turning radius used with traffic circles.

A neighborhood roundabout in Washington State. WSDOT

A Study of the Traffic Safety at Roundabouts in Minnesota

Roundabouts have become an increasingly popular intersection type by traffic engineers, communities, and transportation officials. The purpose of this report is to examine the safety performance of roundabouts by comparing the before construction crash rates and the after construction crash rates and traffic volume data. Overall, roundabouts are performing well when looking at the crash reduction record. Roundabouts in Minnesota have had over an 80% reduction in fatal and serious injury crashes

Minnesota has ~200 roundabouts, and like any other skeptical traffic engineering team, they’ve been documenting the results.

Carmel, Indiana has 138 roundabouts, the most of any city in the US. Roundabouts move traffic more efficiently and reduce the number of fatalities and serious-injury accidents. They work because of their safety record, their compatibility with the environment, their aesthetics and their ability to make it easier for pedestrians and bicyclists to navigate.

April 6, 2022April 6, 2022

Speeding Is A Problem In Asbury Park

No surprise there.

Our streets are especially dangerous for people walking or rolling. There’s an ongoing need to build more and better protected biking and walking infrastructure. We need to enable people to get around safely without dependency on cars, whether walking, riding a bike, riding a scooter, skateboard, or using a wheelchair.

What can be done right NOw?

We must design physical elements on our streets to deter speeding.

Bicyclists, scooter riders, skateboarders, elderly, children and their families are the most vulnerable road users. Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition is committed to helping to make our streets safe for everyone to get around safely – if streets are safe for an 8-year-old or an 80-year-old, they are safe for all.

Asbury Park is the recipient of a generous grant of 500,000 from Safe Routes To School for a project utilizing roundabouts as a traffic calming method to prevent speeding.

Safe Routes to School (SRTS) safety and access improvements will provide traffic calming measures on Third Avenue and Fourth Avenue between Prospect Avenue and Comstock Street. The project Design and Construction cost is funded by federal funds administered through NJDOT Local Aid Transportation Alternatives (TA) Program and Design Assistance.

The SRTS funds are intended to install mini-roundabouts in key locations where speeding has been a serious problem.

How effective are mini roundabouts?

The city of Carmel, Indiana has more than 100 roundabouts and is installing more. Studies have consistently found roundabouts to be safer than conventional stop signs or signal systems. In fact, replacing signals with roundabouts has been shown to decrease an intersection’s number of traffic fatalities by 90 percent (PDF).

Mini-roundabouts throughout the US are showing promising results as safety-conscious, cost-effective solutions, replacing less efficient all-way and stop-controlled intersections.
Mini-roundabouts are used where the existing speed limit is 25 mph or less and in urban, suburban and smaller municipal environments.

Bottom line:

“Traffic calming is a full range of methods to slow cars, but not necessarily ban them, as they move through commercial and residential neighborhoods. The benefit for pedestrians and bicyclists is that cars now drive at speeds that are safer and more compatible to walking and bicycling. There is, in fact, a kind of equilibrium among all of the uses of a street, so no one mode can dominate at the expense of another.”

For a deeper dive, take a look at the USDOT Federal Highway Administration Lesson In Traffic Calming:

FHWA COURSE ON BICYCLE AND PEDESTRIAN TRANSPORTATION describes objectives, considerations, and various methods to calm traffic, such as circles and roundabouts, medians, bumps, speed humps. raised crosswalks. raised intersections, bump outs, curb extensions, and more. All of these devices are intended to #slowthecars, and are carefully determined to be applied in areas in which they will be most effective.

How you can help:

Subscribe to this website to stay informed.
Share your email to APCSC mailing list/Google Group: apcpompletestreets@gmail.com.
Call and email Mayor and City Council to offer your support for safe streets for the most vulnerable, and using traffic calming methods, especially mini-roundabouts.
Talk to neighbors and friends.
As always we welcome your constructive comments!

September 2, 2020September 3, 2020

It’s Time To Break Up With Cars

Americans didn’t immediately fall in love with cars. It’s been a Machiavellian relationship for a century, so maybe we can break up now.

The Car Culture That’s Helping Destroy the Planet Was By No Means Inevitable

Jeff Sparrow

On the Relentless Campaign to Force Americans to Accept the Automobile

“In 1995, comedian Denis Leary recorded a track called “Asshole,” a song about an all-American guy who likes “football and porno and books about war.” It concludes with a monologue:

I’m gonna get myself a 1967 Cadillac Eldorado convertible
Hot pink, with whale skin hubcaps
And all leather cow interior
And big brown baby seal eyes for head lights
And I’m gonna drive in that baby at 115 miles per hour
Gettin’ one mile per gallon
Sucking down Quarter Pounder cheese burgers from McDonald’s
In the old-fashioned, non-biodegradable styrofoam containers
And when I’m done sucking down those greaseball burgers
I’m gonna wipe my mouth with the American flag
And then I’m gonna toss the styrofoam containers right out the side

And there ain’t a goddamn thing anybody can do about it … “

Yes, there is. Vote.

For those concerned about the environment, cars are an ecological catastrophe, while the current president celebrates car ownership as a true hallmark of freedom for blue blooded Americans, and the US remains the “spiritual home of car culture”. Vote.

So are we doomed to live forever in a polarized country where there is a constant war for space on the road between people walking, on bikes, and driving, and over 40 thousand people die in automobile collisions each year?

Maybe there is hope. Vote.

Cars don’t have to own us.

Here’s something to think about as American cities (and yes, we in Asbury Park) try to figure out how to keep people safe while social distancing by opening streets to people walking, riding bikes, skateboards, scooters…there could be one good thing that comes out of Covid-19.

The spaces between parked cars can be for people, not for car domination. It’s so in cities where drivers don’t rule the roads. As one Face Book commenter in the thread notes, when he drives into one of these streets he “immediately wonders whether he should be there, then sees the benefits to everyone, and drives slowly and cautiously to his destination”. With American car culture could this happen here, or would we continue to see angry, entitled drivers claiming their right to the road, endangering us all?

Here’s the link to Modacitylife FaceBook page, where you can enjoy beautiful city inspiration, listen to the audio book, Building The Cycling City, and buy the book here.

July 23, 2020July 23, 2020

Do It In The Road: Asbury Park ReOPEN and Slow Streets Pilots

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.

WESTWORDS

TUESDAY, JULY 21, 2020

Liberate Cookman Avenue!

Asbury Park Says Be All You Can Be

ReOpen Asbury Park: Cookman Ave Business District.

What is a “Streaterie”?

Restaurant seating set up on the street.

A “Streaterie”, in this case resembling a Parklet

Businesses selling wares on the street.

The Book Co-Op set up on the sidewalk for passersby to browse.

April 9, 2020

Let’s Close Some Streets To Cars And Allow More Space For People

There’s less traffic everywhere in the world right now. More people are staying close to home, and many are walking and riding bikes. At the same time drivers are speeding more. Maybe it’s an increased sense of driver entitlement with more open roads, or the knowledge that police are less likely to engage with speeders, and in some cities even refusing to respond to calls for non-injury crashes, all making streets even more dangerous.

As always, but especially now we need to be more aware of the most vulnerable moving about in our cities: people walking, biking, and using other forms of micro-transit. To maintain 6′ distance during the viral outbreak, people walking must move off too-narrow sidewalks into the street. Those who ride bikes must also maintain 6′ distance. But bike riders fearful of speeding and distracted drivers may feel safer on sidewalks, even if there are bike lanes. Paint doesn’t protect.

The problem isn’t walkers or people on bikes. It’s #toomanycars, and #slowthecars.

Let’s consider closing some Asbury Park streets to automotive traffic to allow more space for people. If we envision the successful street closures during the Sea. Hear. Now Festival, we can see that Ocean Avenue could be closed to cars, at least temporarily while the boardwalk is closed (and probably soon the beach). Cookman Avenue would make a great walking plaza, especially now while businesses are mostly closed, and maybe it could remain permanently a place for people. It’s becoming evident all over the world that cities are more vibrant where there are fewer cars. This would be a great time to try it out.

How to Open Streets Right During Social Distancing

By Kea Wilson Apr 8, 2020

“The first place we should start, the advocates we spoke to argued, is with closing off as many streets as possible that run through our parks to motor vehicles — not just a handful of them, as may cities are doing now. And it’d be even better to close off roads adjacent to parks, too: Mike Lydon and Tony Garcia, tactical urbanism superstars and co-principals of Street Plans, offered particular applause to Minneapolis’ decision to allow limited road closures near its river front.

Next stop: the cul-de-sacs. Streets that are already pretty quiet have absolutely no reason to allow non-resident traffic right now, when the risk of killing new crowds of of walker vastly outweighs the risk of holding up a traffic pattern that has largely come to a standstill. And that goes for through-streets that don’t connect major essential services, too.

Third stop: those small, walkable shopping districts where all the businesses are closed anyway. Jason Roberts of Better Block thinks it’s particularly important to give residents safe, contactless access to window shopping, street vendors, and even shuttered restaurants, which can be converted into open-air markets through Better Block’s free downloadable shelf plans.”

Read all about it:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/04/08/how-to-open-streets-right-during-social-distancing/

March 22, 2020March 20, 2020

Slower Speed Limits Will Help Stop Corona Virus

With a concern for overcrowding in hospitals, Italy and Spain have, as of March 16th, banned cycling in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. Health authorities there are urging cyclists not to ride because of the risk of being injured on the road and putting additional stress on an already over-burdened healthcare system. This is a backward approach. The real danger is speeding motor vehicles. Cars, particularly speeding cars killed over 40,000 people in the US last year. Each year, 1.35 million people are killed on roadways around the world. Driving a motorized vehicle is far more dangerous than riding a bike, so let’s #slowthecars so we can ride safely, now – and always.

Let’s encourage people to ride bikes as the healthiest way to get around. We need to limit speeds for motorists to make roads safe for people riding bikes and walking. #20isplenty

Lowering Speed Limits Will Help Stop COVID-19

The last thing our hospitals need right now is more car crash injuries.

By Kea Wilson Mar 16, 2020

A twenty mile per hour neighborhood speed limit saves lives in the best of times. In a pandemic, it can make the difference between an overburdened hospital system and one that’s strained to a breaking point. Source Creative Commons.

Traffic violence puts pressure on the health care system even in the best of times. Car crashes are consistently among the leading injury-related reasons for emergency room admissions in America; when you include cyclists, pedestrians and other vulnerable road users in motor vehicle crash totals, as many as 5,170,000 traffic victims visited U.S. hospitals in 2017, 40,100 of whom ultimately died, according to the CDC.

IT’S TIME TO DESIGN FOR SAFETY, NOT SPEED

We know how to save the lives of people walking and biking…but will we #slowthecars?

Policy makers might not understand how to design safe roads, but more problematic, they are influenced by the automotive industry, so it behooves them to prioritize motor vehicles over other road users – the most vulnerable are not driving or buying cars.

Traffic engineers by definition prioritize the level of service (LOS) of automobiles moving in traffic. In the world of traffic engineering, speed limits are determined by allowing drivers to self-govern, thereby setting speeds according to the 85th Percentile Speed – the speed at or below which 85 percent of vehicles travel.

The numbers of deaths increases drastically with every 10mph. (See graphs/images in the article.) APCSC would like to see Asbury Park determine speed based upon safety. Most drivers know that they can exceed speed limits by 10mph, so how about #20isplenty?

SAFETY OVER SPEED WEEK: THERE’S ONE THING THAT ALMOST EVERY FATAL CAR CRASH HAS IN COMMON

It’s “safety over speed” week here at T4America, and we are spending the week unpacking our second of three principles for transportation investment. Read more about those principles and if you’re new to T4America, you can sign up for email here. Follow along on @T4America this week and check back here on the blog for more related content all week long.

Let’s start with a number: 49,340.

That’s how many people were struck and killed by cars while walking on streets all across the United States between 2008 and 2017. Almost 50,000 preventable deaths.

And yet, by and large, we call these crashes “accidents”. We still believe that these 50,000 deaths, and the deaths of almost 32,000 people every year killed inside of vehicles, are either just the cost of doing business for our transportation system, or were the product of bad behavior: distracted drivers, fatigued drivers, drunk drivers, or drivers not wearing seat belts.

There’s no doubt that distracted driving increases crash risk and should be punished. But distracted driving can’t explain all of these deaths. There’s one thing that almost every crash has in common, though: high vehicle speed.

When crashes occur at higher speeds, they are more likely to be fatal, especially when they involve a person biking or walking.

Read all about it:

http://t4america.org/2019/11/04/safety-over-speed-week-theres-one-thing-that-almost-every-fatal-car-crash-has-in-common/#easy-footnote-bottom-1-28661

August 4, 2019August 3, 2019

#FATALFACTS

We can’t ignore this anymore. Scooters and bikes ARE NOT THE PROBLEM. These numbers are unacceptable. We’re working on solutions in Asbury Park. #toomanycars #slowthecars

Vehicle Deaths Estimated at 40,000 for Third Straight Year

For the first time since the Great Recession, the U.S. has experienced three straight years of at least 40,000 roadway deaths, according to preliminary estimatesreleased Feb. 13 by the National Safety Council. In 2018, an estimated 40,000 people lost their lives to car crashes – a 1% decline from 2017 (40,231 deaths) and 2016 (40,327 deaths). About 4.5 million people were seriously injured in crashes last year – also a 1% decrease over 2017.

Discouragingly, last year’s estimated 40,000 deaths is 14% higher than four years ago. Driver behavior is likely contributing to the numbers staying stubbornly high. The Council’s estimates do not reveal causation; however, 2017 final data show spikes in deaths among pedestrians, while distraction continues to be involved in 8% of crashes, and drowsy driving in an additional 2%.

“Forty-thousand deaths is unacceptable,” said Nicholas Smith, interim president and CEO of NSC. “We cannot afford to tread water any more. We know what works, but we need to demonstrate the commitment to implementing the solutions. Roadway deaths are preventable by doubling down on what works, embracing technology advancements and creating a culture of safer driving.”

Asbury Park Gets A Grant For Safer Streets

Residents on through streets who have been rightfully concerned about speeding will see traffic calming measures put in place to #slowthecars. New bike lanes will be implemented so students can ride to school, and pedestrian safety will be improved with new signals. Thanks Safe Routes To Schools and Transportation Manager Mike Manzella. Asbury Park is building infrastructure to become a model city for biking and walking.

Asbury Park Grant For Pedestrian Safety Improvements

The funds will be used to make pedestrian safety improvements focused on three main areas of resident concern.

By Tom Davis, Patch National Staff | May 30, 2019

“We’re proud of our current Gold Level standing with the Safe Routes to School Program and thankful to EZ Ride for the significant support they’ve provided the city in reaching that goal,” said Transportation Director Michael Manzella. “We have been putting in the work to build and maintain our standing in the program in anticipation of applying for grants such as these and securing future funding.”

Read about it:

https://patch.com/new-jersey/asbury-park/asbury-park-grant-pedestrian-safety-improvements