The strange experience of a car-free parent who finds herself and her kids in a (Zip)car for the afternoon. When do kids start noticing what’s normal, and what’s not? How do you get them not to care?
Tag: transportation
Bicycles and Fresh Bread
The NY Times points out that bicycles and the European penchant for fresh bread are more closely related than you might at first imagine. A writer in Amsterdam talks about how a slightly different conception of daily life enables cities without cars, and how that life is really more free than our slavish commitment to the car.
Location Efficiency More Important than Home Energy Efficiency
How important is Location Efficiency? Median US home price: $175k. With a traditional 20% down 30 year mortgage, total loan payments amount to about $350k. Utilities over the same timeframe are around $75k. And the cost of commuting from suburbia? Roughly $300k! This is in general agreement with the energy (as opposed to financial) analysis recently published by the EPA.
Across Europe, Irking Drivers is Urban Policy
The New York Times almost seems upset that in Europe the mobility of people, not motor vehicles, is the measure of an urban transportation system. With finite funding and urban space constraints, you sometimes have to choose which mode to prioritize. Pedestrians, bicycles, and mass transit all move more people in less space, with less GHG emissions, noise and pollution, more safely than cars. De-prioritizing automobiles also makes streets into vastly more livable public spaces. It’s not about making life bad for cars, it’s about making it good for people!
The American suburbs are a giant Ponzi scheme
Suburbia as Ponzi scheme. We have subsidized suburban growth through debt and taxes, and reaped the short-term financial rewards of that growth, but at the expense of taking on ever larger long-term liabilities in terms of infrastructure maintenance and a very energy intensive transportation system. I disagree with Strong Towns on the appropriate overall scale of habitation (more people and a much larger fraction of our overall economy live in cities, not towns), but this is (another) good critique of the American Nightmare.
Slugging
Slugging is a self-organized carpooling system that’s popular in Washington DC. People who want to use the HOV lanes troll known meetup locations for folks heading to the same exits on the freeway out of DC, and pick up several strangers. Seems like a great consequence of having HOV lanes… But then I saw the distances and times involved. Alone, people are driving 6 miles, and it takes an hour. In the HOV lane, it’s cut to a mere 30 minutes. With any kind of semi-reasonable infrastructure, bikes would beat even the carpoolers in a race.
On the Economics of Mass Transit and the Value of Common Sense
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight thinks about what we ought to measure when comparing public transportation options. Does Modesto, CA really have better public transit than New York City? There are a lot of measurable quantities, but only some of them are interesting. In particular, it’s not the absolute convenience of public transit that matters — rather, it’s transit’s relative convenience compared to driving alone that determines how people get around.
CycleTracks for iPhone and Android
The San Francisco Transportation Authority created a mobile app to collect bicycle route/usage data called CycleTracks. It’s open source, and we’re thinking it might be fun to adapt for use here in Boulder (and elsewhere) to better understand how people really get around by bike.
Commuting in style
The San Francisco Chronicle has noticed that some people ride bikes without any funny clothes. I’m happy about this, but at the same time, it’s a little strange that it’s news. Hopefully in another few years, it’ll seem so normal, nobody notices.
State DOTs may be forced to return millions in bike/ped funding
The Alliance for Biking & Walking is sounding the alarm on another round of crippling rescissions heading for state and local transportation agencies. A rescission is when the Feds say “Hey, you know that money we gave you? We want it back now.” This happened in 2010 as well, and then 44% of the money returned to DC came from bike, pedestrian, and air quality funding streams, even though they together make up only 7% of federal transportation funds. Yet another example of why local transportation should be funded locally, and why as a cyclist or pedestrian, you should evade your federal taxes whenever possible.