A succinct post by ‘Human Transit’ blogger Jarrett Walker on vehicle congestion (and why transit doesn’t reduce it). He also explains what does. (No surprise: road pricing.)
Great line: “Current road pricing policy [i.e. free] requires motorists to save money, a renewable resource, by expending time, the least renewable resource of all. ”
Even better, he defines five indirect ways transit addresses the impacts of congestion . One I hadn’t thought of: “Surface exclusive transit lanes … improve the performance of emergency services. ”
Emergency response should be one of the strongest and most obvious cases for surface transit lanes. Motorists understand the need to drop to a low speed in school zones, to protect the life of every single child. Why do we not accept some degree of delay to save a child who may be dying somewhere else, because the ambulance is stuck in traffic?
Expect this kind of insight at Jarrett’s City Program lecture – A Field Guide to Transit Debates – on August 4 at 7 pm, SFU Harbour Centre. Still some seats available, but probably not for long.
And while you’re at the SFU City Program site, you might check out the Urban Design and Sustainable Community Development certificate program sites. Still open for registration too.
If motorists understand the need to drop to a low speed in school zones, why don’t they do so?
If the Mayor understands the need to stop at a red light before turning right, why doesn’t he?
I don’t know about Mayor Robertson biking habits, and doubt he really bikes much these days except for photo ops. His time is in demand and he cannot be spending extra hours getting around.
The new bike lanes on Dunsmuir are nice, but there needs to be stronger enforcement there on both right hand turning cars and aggressive cyclists who figure it’s their territory now, pedestrians be damned. Which they had more or less believed even before the new lanes, but now they have concrete proof. Full Speed Ahead.
Yesterday at Homer and Dunsmuir I saw a vehicle make a right turn just a few feet in front of a cyclist who was coming at a very good clip. It was a near miss and one could see the cyclist was majorly steamed, as he should have been.
15 seconds later it was the cycling fraternity’s turn to be jerks. I could see another fast cyclist approaching the intersection from the east as I was set to cross on the west side of the intersection. I knew he had no intention of stopping for anything but a tractor trailer and he didn’t.
He passed in front of me about a half second before the pedestrian WALK light came on, and there’s a full two second delay between his vehicle light going to a full red and when the green and WALK signs in the other direction come on. And if he had been a second or two later still he wouldn’t have cared a bit, unless he hit someone, in which case he would be furious with them for getting in his way.