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Urban planners who try to slow down commute speeds — either by getting people out of their cars and onto transit or by deliberately allowing congestion to grow to reducing driving
Do planners do this?!?
If so, "appalling" would be too light of an aspersion. I would be for investigations and the harshest of possible punishments. Think of the accumulated toll on people's lives and the communities that they live in over decades. Its unimaginable.
It has been my experience that it is traffic that slows commute (and other travel) speed. Planners try to keep up, with varying results. Frequently more lanes, but more stoplights. In some cases providing a transit alternative, but lines that are too short and failing to provide express service.
If so, "appalling" would be too light of an aspersion. I would be for investigations and the harshest of possible punishments. Think of the accumulated toll on people's lives and the communities that they live in over decades. Its unimaginable.
No.
They do try to make transit more useable, which is a good idea.
They try to change street design so that fewer people drive really fast in places where that endangers pedestrians, cyclists, and other drivers (but it usually has minimal effect on total commute time)
They try to make commutes SHORTER by making it possible for people to live closer to work.
If so, "appalling" would be too light of an aspersion. I would be for investigations and the harshest of possible punishments. Think of the accumulated toll on people's lives and the communities that they live in over decades. Its unimaginable.
No one deliberately creates congestion to reduce driving -
Bill DeBlasio actually came out and admitted he was doing exactly this.
Also his D.O.T. chief Janet Khan (?) said likewise after her other stroke of genius: changing every single street sign in NYC to lower case letters (how many millions did this cost?) because she felt that the old ones in ALL CAPS were SHOUTING at her.
There would have been no other plausible explanation for some of the changes they made in the last 5 years.
Today's editorial in the Boulder (Colorado) Daily Camera, a liberal newspaper in a very liberal town: https://www.dailycamera.com/2019/08/...s-in-the-road/
My allowable three: "The city of Boulder wants people to ditch their cars and instead walk, bike and bus on safe and convenient routes. . . The plan is patently anti-car. It reserves its greatest opprobrium for single-occupant vehicles (which it calls, perhaps with a winking echo of an abbreviation for a common vulgarity, SOVs), and it wants to reduce the miles traveled by those cars that are on the road."
I suggest reading the whole thing before commenting on it.
Not saying bikes can be as important as transit for reducing VMT. But its quite possible to bike commute in a very wide range of weathers, and people do.
Stats from Minneapolis as of June, 2019: "In the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, men who work were twice as likely to commute via bike as women who work, at 1.2 percent, compared to 0.6 percent.
The gap holds up when you look at the Twin Cities’ most bike-dense areas, in Minneapolis proper (5.1 percent of men bike to work compared to 3 percent of women), and in St. Paul (2.1 percent of men bike to work and 1.2 percent of women do)." https://www.minnpost.com/metro/2019/...of-u-s-cities/
It is a HUGE problem in urban planning that its adherents are mostly male, mostly young and mostly unmarried, not having to concern themselves much with personal safety, disabilities, and children.
LMAO. That "living over stores" has been going on for centuries, even for a few millennia.
And it was a previous generation of US planners who decided, goodness knows why,
that arrangements like that weren't modern, that residences and retail had to be separated,
and that people would go from one to the other by individual private vehicles.
That model held sway for decades, and left big problems in its wake.
Bill DeBlasio actually came out and admitted he was doing exactly this.
Also his D.O.T. chief Janet Khan (?) said likewise after her other stroke of genius: changing every single street sign in NYC to lower case letters (how many millions did this cost?) because she felt that the old ones in ALL CAPS were SHOUTING at her.
There would have been no other plausible explanation for some of the changes they made in the last 5 years.
Actually, a revision of the MUTCD in the mid-2000s recommended that cities replace all-caps street-name signs with mixed-case ones to improve readability (from what I recall reading at the time, your eyes basically read only the top halves of letters to determine what they are, and the top halves of lowercase letters can be deciphered faster than the top halves of all-caps. The descender strokes on lowercase letters like g, p, q and y also help).
Philadelphia and Washington both made that switch around the same time, and most other large cities that weren't already doing so (e.g., New Orleans) also now produce mixed-case street name signs.
That's not a Janet Khan- or New York-specific move.
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