Asbury Park Scooter Share

Asbury Park has initiated a new scooter share, and we have great hopes to see it succeed. The purpose of a scooter share and bike share in any city is to reduce car dependency. We have excessive traffic in Asbury Park, especially in the summer months, and parking is at a premium, so for those who might be interested in getting to destinations in the city car-free, a scooter is a great alternative transportation option!

There are rules in place that apply to scooter riding, which are similar to the rules for bike riding. We have a dream of a completely walkable and bikeable, car-free city. While we encourage everyone riding bikes and scootering to adhere to the rules, it may take time for users to feel safe and comfortable riding on streets along with motor vehicles, with only painted stripes between them and multi-ton vehicles. Until we effectively lower traffic speeds and reduce the volume of cars, people riding bikes and scooters are faced with the decision of where they can ride safely.

Currently the users of bike lanes in Asbury Park are not protected from vehicular traffic, and almost every existing bike lane is between traffic and in the “door zone” next to parked cars, which places these vulnerable road users in a position to possibly get hit by a driver door, or have to swerve into traffic. Scooter riders and bike riders are often quite literally invisible to many drivers. Some drivers are distracted or inattentive. And there are some aggressive drivers who are angered at the very sight of other road users.

Walkers often say that they were “almost hit” or are “scared” of riders on the sidewalk. People who ride bikes and scooters are almost literally between a rock and a hard place: whether they are willing to endanger their own lives on the road or whether they might frighten walkers on the sidewalk. So some riders will be courageous enough to claim the narrow painted strip of asphalt designated for bikes and scooters, but others may feel safer on the sidewalk.

We will have to allow time to get along. While we continue to build infrastructure on our streets to make them safe for people, we can build a cooperative relationship between walkers and riders. Let’s all focus on the real dangers of drivers of motor vehicles, responsible for killing over 40 thousand people a year in the US.

Fewer cars on the roads will save lives, improve human health and the environment. Enabling people to ride bikes and scooters safely will help make Asbury Park a city for people, not for cars.

Link Electric Scooter Sharing Information

Electric Scooter Sharing

Scooter share provides residents, employees, and visitors with an electric foot scooter to rent for a quick errand, a trip to the beach, or a climate-friendly commute. Riders can rent the nearest available scooter, ride it to where they want to go, and leave it responsibly parked for the next person to ride.

The City of Asbury Park has selected LINK powered by Superpedestrian to deploy an electric scooter share program across the entire City starting May 21, 2021. The program includes up to 250 scooters stationed at over 50 designated parking locations around Asbury Park.

In selecting the LINK team to help launch Asbury Park’s e-mobility project, the City is sure to receive quality products and commitment from the experienced e-scooter provider. These scooters will be equipped with front and rear safety lights, a bell and a speed limiter of up to 12mph. They will be available for rent Monday to Sunday from 7am to 9pm for riders 18 years and older.‍

Everything you need to know about scooter riding in Asbury Park

January 1, 2021December 31, 2020

Goodbye 2020

There are no easy ways to describe 2020 as it comes to a close. In the past weeks writers have been philosophizing, analyzing, probing for meaning and grasping for lessons going forward. In Asbury Park we can learn from the mistakes made during these months during the pandemic. We’ve had false starts, beginning with rolling out a neighborhood Slow Streets program without enough community input, and quickly dismantling it. We made the great step of prioritizing people by implementing an Open Streets plan on Cookman Ave (with the hope of making it permanent), allowing foot traffic, outdoor dining and retail on the street between Thursdays and Monday mornings. Then a we sent a conflicting message that cars rule, advertising free holiday parking and welcoming drivers back. Asbury Park social justice advocates are working to limit police interaction in mental health calls and traffic enforcement. And Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition is continually working with city leaders to make city streets safer and more livable, especially for the most vulnerable. None of it will be easy, and we are grateful for community support.

Onward to 2021.

Goodbye to 2020, a Truly Unimaginable Year for Sustainable Transportation

By Kea Wilson Dec 30, 2020

Black Lives Matter Plaza, created by the Government of the District of Columbia, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. Photo: Ted Eytan via Creative Commons

Let’s pause for a second and imagine that we could go back in time to Dec. 31, 2019, and tell sustainable transportation advocates what this year held in store for our movement.

Imagine how those hypothetical advocates would react if you told them that, within a few months, roughly two-thirds of all car traffic would abruptly vanish from U.S. streets.

Imagine what our former selves would say you if you told them that such a rapture would prompt countless cities across the country to transform roadways that used to be dedicated exclusively to private vehicles into places to play, move, eat, shop, learn, and more.

Then imagine their faces if you told them that countless other cities would do nothing at all, even as those wide-empty streets encouraged the drivers who remained to speed out of control — forcing per-mile car crash rates to a terrifying, 15-year high.

Read this great article:

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2020/12/30/goodbye-to-2020-a-truly-unimaginable-year-for-sustainable-transportation/

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.”

On The Road This Thanksgiving?

Asbury Park Complete Streets Coalition wishes everyone a safe and happy Thanksgiving, and we hope your traffic woes are at a minimum in this holiday season!

We’re at critical mass with #toomanycars. Buses, trains, electric ride sharing, bikes, and even scooters will need to become more realistic options for day-to-day travel, whether we’re going home from work or home for the holidays. Thanksgiving is a good time to start trying to promote that message.

The Lessons of Holiday Traffic Congestion

ANDREW SMALL

The annual holiday gridlock reveals the failure of the American imagination when it comes to other transportation choices.

It’s Turkey Time in America, and you know the deal: Prepare for traffic hell.More than 55 million Americans will travel more than 50 miles away from home for the Thanksgiving holiday, AAA predicts. This figure has been steadily rising; it is, once again, the highest since 2005. About 1.5 million people will be taking trains, buses, and various forms of public transportation to their destinations. Another 4.45 million Americans will fly to friends and family. The rest are driving. As we motor from suburb to suburb, back to little hometowns and over to new retirement communities, Thanksgiving exposes America’s utter dependence on automobility like no other holiday.

Automobiles drive in heavy traffic along the Long Island Expressway in the Queens borough of New York, U.S., November 20, 2018. REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton – RC189962B510

Read about it~

https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2019/11/thanksgiving-traffic-congestion-cars-flights-transit-data/602650/

November 5, 2019November 4, 2019

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

April 5, 2019April 4, 2019

Congestion Pricing Is A Great Idea…It’s About Time

We’ve hit peak car. People are complaining about traffic, and lack of parking in Asbury Park and in cities all over the US. Building wider roads was never a good idea (induced demand), and it isn’t feasible or economically a great idea to build more parking (Cities are eliminating parking.) Maybe car culture in the US is about to change.

The Streets Were Never Free. Congestion Pricing Finally Makes That Plain.

The policy could change not just traffic, but also how we think about the infrastructure cars require.

By Emily Badger April 4th, 2019

The idea of the open road evokes these intertwined meanings: The freedom to use it should be free. Residential street parking should be free. Traffic lanes should be free. Stretches of public curb dedicated to private driveways? Those should be free, too.

In other ways, the government has heavily subsidized driving, or hidden the reality of who pays for it in places no one sees. Local laws require off-street parking from businesses and housing developers, who pass on the construction cost of it to tenants and customers who may not drive at all.

Read the article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/upshot/the-streets-were-never-free-congestion-pricing-finally-makes-that-plain.html

February 4, 2019February 2, 2019

Asbury Park’s Grid Will Ease Traffic Congestion

This article will help Asbury Park drivers, residents, business owners, and visitors understand the causes of congestion, and to envision how the the road diet on Main Street will work especially well due to our grid design (along with reduced speed limits) to calm traffic.

The Neighborhood Traffic Trade-Off

January 30, 2019 by Daniel Herriges

People like to blame traffic on one simple, but logical, cause: there are “too many cars” on the road. Opponents of new development, in particular, cite traffic more often than any other issue as a reason for their opposition. And in most places you’ll find a widespread consensus that traffic on residential streets is particularly objectionable. It introduces noise and pollution, and most importantly, it poses a safety hazard. Keep through traffic to major thoroughfares and off side streets, goes the logic. Development approvals, especially for retail businesses, often even come with stipulations about closing access points to ensure that neighborhood streets aren’t affected by those coming and going.

Bike Lanes Are The Best Fix For Traffic Congestion

Cities are at peak car. Traffic congestion and crashes are a constant issue. It’s been shown over and over that adding bike lanes (and walking infrastructure) is a cheap and easy fix in large cities like Toronto, and in small cities it’s even easier. Let’s commit to bike infrastructure. We’ll patiently wait for naysayers and car addicts to calm down as traffic eases and crashes are reduced.

Bike lanes prove that transportation solutions can be cheap and effective

By EDWARD KEENANStar Columnist

Fri., Jan. 11, 2019

Read about it…

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/star-columnists/2019/01/11/bike-lanes-prove-that-transportation-solutions-can-be-cheap-and-effective.html