The Bureau and Budget Advisory Committee is having a hard time figuring out how to spend too much money on cars and then also somehow spend money we don't have on adding safety, staff treats the committee like a panel of fundraising advocates, total farce #VisionZero#Portland#pdxTraffic
My 12yo is waging a protest against gravity being hard, I mean I totally understand how PBOT and our entire city govt is institutionally wishing cars would pay full price but be cheap and the streets would be empty like a car commercial but bustling with economic activity, and all of it electric & powered by cinnamon-scented #UnicornFarts. #climateWishing#CarsRuinCities#InducedDemand#ScienceDenial#TrafficEngineering
Prevent half of traffic deaths with this one weird trick: deaths/VMT is constant, VMT is an #InducedDemand function of lane-miles. Eliminate half of the thruway car lanes, eliminate half of miles travelled, eliminate half of deadly crashes. #VisionZero requires complete redesigns to zero-out death/VMT, but we can start with half.
crushing before/after pics of how we made this street more deadly.
Remember the traffic models for the Hawthorne repaving somehow needing to deliver a greater number of cars to here (instead of #pdxBikes lanes) from the other side of the bridge where we spent millions to keep sending them instead of finishing Naito the easy way. Couldn't be 2 spare lanes of #InducedDemand.
#Portland#pdx has been breaking-in a fresh new #pdxTraffic commissioner (with no bureau director for 6 months...), and Mingus Mapps seems to still be focused on the stack of boondoggle carway projects #PBOT has put in front of him. Seems to think that the members of the Bike + Pedestrian Advisory Committees are here to lobby for more funding for the bureau of traffic to continue the status quo of maintaining the whole transportation system for #cars1stAlwaysOnly. Drivers feeling the $30M cut?
We need to get out of the mindset that #safeStreets are expensive (or that they look like #CompleteStreets) and the dangerous ones are a force of nature that we have to keep spending all the money on. When you count the cars per day on the street and always allocate at least as many lanes as your manual says they need, and every mile driven costs you money... of course your budget is a disaster. #transportation#ClimateDenial#trafficEngineers#InducedDemand#DefundDOTs
The uphill conditions would have had me riding on the sidewalk if not for the e-bike. #WorkZoneWTF#ODOTGTFOpdx#BarburBlvd All we need is for this to be a bus-only lane and everything would be much calmer and simpler. Five years ago, right now, whenever we're ready to admit that more lanes for cars doesn't fix traffic. #InducedDemand
This is who #trafficEngineers are trying to placate with #CompleteStreets and preserving all of the extra car lanes. Creating #InducedDemand for privileged white idiots to think they own the roads. Cars don't even pay for basic maintenance, why prioritize them?
Never ceases to amaze me how somebody could easily fit a 10 minute #bike ride into their day to run a quick errand if it saved them 10-20min of sitting in #traffic and looking for parking but DOTs spend millions of dollars to keep them in cars. And,! this last 10-20% of traffic, people who would rather be biking, is what creates #congestion. Half of daily #transportation trips are under 3 miles. 🙄
The worst is how #trafficEngineers make excuses for keeping it this way but 1: this "profession" kills 40k ppl/yr in the US, and 2: their predictions are based on #fakeScience that has been repeatedly proven wrong by #InducedDemand or the inverse: #TrafficEvaporation. Go ahead and knock down a freeway and show me I'm wrong.
Lake Oswego #drivers who think they're more important than you are the root cause* of #pdxTraffic
(* actually the cause is #trafficEngineers designing streets specifically to create #InducedDemand for assholes to arm themselves with a car and behave like this.)
How does our TSP designation of "Neighborhood Collector" fit with #SWTFpdx Taylors Ferry being basically just more freeway lanes? How about if it's also a City Bikeway but has no bike lanes or sidewalks? As for the $4B backlog: there's no way the net cost of this #pdxTraffic is less than a dollar per VMT. $30 dollars per minute for this intersection alone? 💸 #transportation#InducedDemand the #RobertMoses freeway plan lives on in our failure to manage surface-street traffic.
... it's profoundly sad, how engineers can take a class on hydrology and recognize [how the system / network design creates a flood] ...walk down the hall to a traffic class, and look at the same system dynamics and not reach the same conclusion." #StrongTowns#InducedDemand
would be neat if the choice between driving or biking a couple miles was just a few dollars vs some extra minutes, not "and also climb over a mountain to avoid getting your life threatened with cars but also still get your life threatened anyway" #InducedDemand#CaptiveDrivers
I'm not saying an electric #cargoBike is going to solve every feminist issue in our cities, but it's a heckuva stroller/diaper bag/"sag wagon" for "encumbered travel". Being able to take kids to school or the park without having to park a car and then walk through the gauntlet of crosswalks and whatever, and they can jump out and run to the swings as soon as you get to the park sidewalk, etc. It's so great for kids to learn the neighborhood and mobility by bike.
Which is to say that DOTs need to do a better job for moms-on-#eBikes as a core service. Not like the designs for 20 years from now if-we-get-around-to-funding-it, actually go follow a mom on a #cargoBike around and make her trips better, now. #climateAction#InducedDemand#ClimateEmergency
#PBOT Bicycle advisory committee presentation about "#ClimateEmergency declaration" work "depending on funding" is so totally absurd. #pdxBikes save you money, cars cost obscene amounts of money to serve... Totally bullshit strategy that you'll somehow get people out of their cars without cutting back on how much debt you rack up encouraging them to drive 🤡 💸 💸 💸 #InducedDemand
We've added population but not traffic lanes, so total traffic (#InducedDemand, a function of total lanes) stays flat. Wishing traffic would go down does nothing, but cutting car lanes in half will cut VMT in half. I don't make the rules.
@indw@kurtn that's a fallacy, besides the idea that you somehow would instantly have zero freeways if the DOT spent exclusively on bike+bus / transit mobility for a few years to scrap together an entire actual network of viable options to driving (just reallocate some of the many spare car lanes, to make bike and/or bus trips viable, and car traffic will shift to those modes, this is known as #InducedDemand, #TrafficEvaporation, "you get the traffic you build for", etc)
@mbonsma#InducedDemand aka "You get the traffic you build for" works in both directions, for all modes. If #bikes or #transit are easy, reliable, convenient, and seem safe, then driving alone + paying to park is not an appealing option for the vast majority of trips. #trafficEngineers know this, so they count cars & build for that number of cars (usually only for cars because by then they've used the whole budget) thus ensuring that they stay employed because now there's endless traffic 🙄.
👉 Taking Away Space From Cars While Giving Them More Space At The Same Time
👉 Leaving Even More Urban Space For …
👉 Housing 🏘, Parks 🌳, Plazas 🏛& Much More 🚲🚃🛴🚶♂️