System Rants and Raves

On Twitter, in response to yet another comment on an egregious auto "accident", I posted: " Try to say crashes, not accidents. It’s a poorly designed system with predictable failures. We deliberately choose to not fix it. It’s no accident." A commenter responded: " How could we improve the design?" This is a very good question, and I was tempted to just say, "really, you can't", but that's not very instructive.  Anyway, there is a lot to this. First, let's go up a level. One of my favorite quotes: "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all." - Peter Drucker So, doing nothing is an option, and so is working to make cars safer, and so is undoing cars as transportation. This is a critical point. Before improving/optimizing/efficiently doing/etc. anything, we should decide WHY we want to do it. We've spent 100 years making the world better for autos. Was this wise?  Why...

My wife and I just returned from a brief vacation to Carmel, IN.  Probably this is, in and of itself, an unusual statement, as Carmel is not really a vacation destination.  It's a relative unremarkable but fairly affluent northern suburb to Indianapolis, and it would probably be completely unremarkable except for two unique decisions by the city: 1) To make their stretch of abandoned-railroad-converted-into-bikeway - a rails-to-trails conversion sort of trail that is common throughout the country - a centerpiece of the town instead of the usual 2-bit amenity for recreational cyclists 2) To invest in cycling infrastructure, plus slowing down cars, such that the area around the new district is people-friendly and car-limited. For people who have traveled to the Netherlands, this would perhaps seem rather obvious -- every town seems to take what it is has uniquely going for it -- a nice canal, an old traditional city core, a picturesque church or two -- and build around it a nice...

 In my neighborhood, there are no posted speed limits for residential streets, except the main mid-mile feeder which got signage because everybody drove far faster (and still do, despite some speed-humps). That means that the speed limit is the city default of 25mph, unless otherwise marked...every residential street, including cul-de-sacs.  The feeder street is marked 25mph, while the arterials are 40mph (2-lane) or 45mph (5-lane) depending. A lot of places are talking about the notion of 15-minute cities, where almost all of your daily needs are within a 15 minute walk.  Other places are talking about "20 is plenty"  -- 20mph max speed anywhere in town.    These notions seem to fit together nicely, since more accessibility to daily needs by food or bike means that fewer trips are made by car, and so a few extra minutes of driving now and then isn't really a very big deal. Today I had a fairly routine trip to the local hardware store.  This is th...

For those of us who have traveled a bit, and seen the car-free or car-lite centers of European towns with quaint streets from Medieval times, strolled the quiet walkable/bikeable streets of the Netherlands after riding their excelling trains, been in India during the age of cycling and mopeds and then again after in their age of cars, or wandered through the rebuilt cities of China with their wide multi-mode streets along with the ancestral parks with wandering paths, the impact of cars on our lives is perhaps a bit more noticeable than for our countrymen at large. I've recently been fond of the technocratic side of cycling and autos, delving into the impact of cars on city pollution, noise, emissions, and hazards, and the relative math of transportation modes, and the uncertain Faustian bargain of EV's and self-driving cars.  I've advocated for cycling for years, from the days of recreation pathways (rails to trails and river-edge paths, etc.) to the seize-th...