Thanks to a heads-up from James Baumgartner, author of Car-free in PVD, check out this Blueprint America Special Report called Crossing the Line:
Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.
This is what happens when you design roads for cars instead of people.
Also see the discussion at Commute Orlando.
Comments 8
Hi Andy,
That was a fantastic find! This is exactly the reason why I make sure to read your blog everyday.
I’m now living in Barrington Illinois a suburb of Chicago. Barrington is a city of 10,000 and is about 30 miles away from downtown Chicago. Its the most walkable and bikeable community that I have ever lived in but most suburbs are just the opposite. I think it helps that this community is very wealthy and its an older city that was built well before freeway mentality took over.
Here is an article that I think you will find VERY interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/2e5nl89
Posted 29 Jul 2010 at 11:15 am ¶Robert… Cool! What are you up to these days? Your leaving is surely a loss for Columbia. Thanks for the link! I’ll check it out.
Posted 29 Jul 2010 at 11:26 am ¶I’m working from home as the Director of Consulting for PedNet.
There is an excellent chance that I will be flying into the Springfield airport at least once in August.
Oddly, I can get to Springfield faster from here than I can from Columbia. Flight time is one hour and twenty minutes and I can get to the airport in about 45 minutes. : )
Posted 29 Jul 2010 at 11:41 am ¶Robert… That’s excellent. Gimme a holler when you get here.
Posted 29 Jul 2010 at 1:52 pm ¶It’s the same situation as East Colonial Drive in Orlando. Even the marked crosswalks are dangerous.
Posted 29 Jul 2010 at 7:07 pm ¶Steve… Yep. When you design for machines instead of humans you get dangerous situations. We have a few new intersections in Springfield with the wide, curved right turns. Drivers at these intersections treat red lights as yields and don’t even watch for pedestrians. I’ll be posting some video when school starts. Frightening.
Posted 29 Jul 2010 at 11:14 pm ¶We face constant roadblocks from the DOT and CTST (community traffic safety teams) to fixing this problem. DOT doesn’t want to do ANYTHING to interrupt traffic flow. They want the problem to be solved by making the pedestrians walk to the nearest signalized intersection. That could be 1/2 mile in blazing heat with no shade and sometimes no sidewalk. Then at the intersection they’re crossing half again as many lanes. The walk signal is so short an elderly person couldn’t make it and that’s even without having to jump back onto the sidewalk to avoid the right-turning cars.
CTST only looks at the fatalities, which are the mid-block crashes and heavily weighted to night-time, homeless, intoxicated, and then they decide we don’t have to do anything because it doesn’t affect “normal” people. WELL DUH! No one who can afford to drive a car would walk in these places. We’ve managed to make walking something done only by the desperate.
Posted 30 Jul 2010 at 10:05 am ¶Geez, I lived a few years just blocks off of Buford Highway … way back in the late 60s – early 70s. I can’t remember, but I’m thinking the interstates around Atlanta were handling over 20 cars for every one car they were designed for at that time. I never started my morning or evening commute in my 1969 Corvette without a newspaper or a good book. It was bound to take an hour to an hour and a half in the stop and go traffic on the Freeways. Buford Highway runs parallel to one of the ones I used. At that time, motorists were so courteous to each other. Traffic in the outside lane and on-ramps would alternate with each other.
Bicycles were pretty much out of my mind at the time. I did start commuting on a Sears 10 speed sometime in the mid 70s, in Rockmart, GA. (about 60 miles NW from the center of Atlanta). This was when gasoline prices were through the roof at $0.649 per gallon (up from $0.20 – $0.25). For some time, gas stations were closed from Saturday night to Monday morning by law, if I remember right.
Posted 30 Jul 2010 at 1:08 pm ¶