I ranted the other day, in a reblog of someone else's lovely rant about businesses who won't provide publicly-facing restrooms, that this is a crisis, it's getting worse for hard-to-solve reasons, and once fecal spore spread diseases return to widespread community spread, we're all going to spend a lot of time sick and a lot of us are going to die. Cholera, the reason we mandated public restrooms in the first place, is no joke.
Lack of public restrooms can be a barrier to using transit — and a devastating problem for those who have no choice but to ride. This compan
There is a solution, at least two cities have proven it, it's even cheaper and more effective than mandating that all places open to the public provide them, and the pilot projects turned out to be even cheaper and even more beneficial than the most optimistic forecasts.
One thing you can do about it is forward this link to the city/county council member that represents where you live, and/or to your state legislator(s), and if you live in a place that has public transit, to whoever answers emails at your transit agency. And I wish you would, while there's still time.
“ So there you have it. We are taxing the healthiest, most inexpensive, most environmentally friendly, most efficient, and most economically sustainable form of transportation ever devised by the human species.”
It’s official: Oregon now has a $15 bike tax Jonathan Maus, BikePortland
More from Streetsblog: Caving to Resentment Politics, Oregon Enacts a Bike Tax
When a Progressive Community Fails to See Its Own Biases, Bullying and Bigotry Get a Pass: Sahra Sulaiman of Streetsblog on bigotry and bullying in the bike advocacy community, as personified by disgraced city council candidate Josef Bray-Ali (more)
5:13 on.soundcloud.com/mJcC1
Bike Wars: Seamus Garrity interviews Streetsblog LA Editor Joe Linton and Streets For All Founder Michael Schneider on Los Angeles's misleading claims about its progress towards Mobility Plan 2035, and the ballot measure that would force the city to implement its plan. la.streetsblog.org/2023/04/13/asto…-mobility-plan/
22:26 on.soundcloud.com/Kj2sx
Driver Lobby: Toronto Star Journalist Matt Elliot counters anti-bike bad faith arguments with guest host Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher. www.thestar.com/opinion/contribut…ke-lobby-are.html
37:16 on.soundcloud.com/8uiY2
Thoreau on a Bike: Mark Cramer, author of "If Thoreau Rode A Bicycle," talks to Taylor Nichols.
49:45 on.soundcloud.com/WqyM2
A Challenge: Anna Zivarts, Director of the Mobility Disability Initiative, on the #WeekWithoutDriving, with Nick Richert.
Editing by Kevin Burton.
Closing Song, "Bike," by Mal Webb.
Interstitial music, "Just Moving," by Don Ward.
Visit BikeTalk.org to be involved.
Monday’s Headlines Want Safer Streets
Almost 43,000 Americans were killed by drivers last year, which Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg calls a "national tragedy."
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2023/04/24/mondays-headlines-want-safer-streets/
People who die in car crashes largely go unmemorialized in the public realm. Here’s why that’s bad.
Legend has it that sometime in the late 1920s, an Ohio governor issued an unusual (and possibly visionary) order: that after every fatal car crash, a marker would be placed on the site of tragedy to remind the public about the dangers of driving.
"But his successor said, 'You know, you're going to cover Ohio with crosses if you do this,'" adds historian Peter Norton. "So he reversed the practice."
Some of the details of the story may be apocryphal, but Norton tells it as a particularly pointed example of a much more well-documented phenomenon: the obliteration of all evidence of traffic violence, and the lives it claims, from streets where nearly 43,000 Americans died just last year.
(...) The sheer absence of mass memorials for car crash victims, of course, is not an accident. And that's in part because, since the earliest days of the automobile — which Norton detailed in his landmark 2008 book Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City — powerful interests have argued that many people who die in traffic violence shouldn't be memorialized at all.
(...) Those sorts of tactics, Norton says, helped reinforce the auto industry's preferred narrative that car crashes, at best, were unfortunate but unavoidable accidents that didn't quite rise to the level of a tragedy deserving of a public expression of grief — much less public demands for life-saving policy reforms. And at worst, automakers reinforced the narrative that dead pedestrians were lawbreakers who only had themselves to blame for their own deaths, rather than innocent people whose killings could and should have been prevented."They wanted the problem to be redefined as a personal loss to be grieved privately by the family," he adds. "And they wanted the victim, [particularly] when the victim was on foot... to bear some of the responsibility — and in the case of children, for their parents, and sometimes their schools [to bear it too.]“
(...) Traffic violence, of course, isn't limited to deaths alone. When it was first launched in St. Louis in 2003, the now-international "ghost bike" movement — or white-painted cycles chained up near sites where cyclists were killed by drivers — was actually called the "Broken Bikes, Broken Lives" project, and its organizers placed markers not just at the sites of traffic fatalities, but at the site of any crash involving a person on two wheels. That approach can help the sheer ubiquity of roadway aggression impossible to ignore, even if an individual memorial is vandalized or scrapped by the DOT."
To me, another big piece of this invisible problem is the amount of mostly invisible intimidation on our streets among people who are not injured and not killed, but who are [nonetheless] struggling to navigate environments that are hostile to them as people on foot or on a bike," Norton added. "It may not even register in the consciousness of a driver for years [but] it's a daily experience for me."
As that Ohio governor pointed out long ago, commemorating all the violence that vulnerable road users experience on U.S. roads every day probably would blanket vast swaths of America in crosses and ghost bikes. Grieving those losses in public, though, would probably be healthier than the silence that enshrouds the U.S. traffic violence epidemic now — especially if the markers we make as we mourn also serve as reminders that traffic deaths can, and must, end.
They should have known how dangerous New York City streets are!
They should have known how dangerous New York City streets are! In a particularly painful example of victim-blaming, the city is arguing in court that the parents of Apolline Mong-Guillemin “caused or contributed to” the death of their 3-month-old baby when a reckless driver who never should have been on the road crashed into another car before both fatally struck the child and injured her mother on the sidewalk.
“Plaintiff[s] culpable conduct caused or contributed to the alleged injuries and the alleged wrongful death,” the city’s Assistant Corporation Counsel Elizabeth Gross wrote in court papers filed late last week in response to a wrongful death lawsuit filed last month by Apolline’s parents, Julien Mong and Marion Guillemin against the city and the drivers involved in the crash. “Plaintiff[s] negligence caused or contributed to the alleged injuries and the alleged wrongful death.”
And after blaming both parents for “negligence” and “culpable conduct” for taking their daughter for a walk on the sidewalk along Vanderbilt and Gates avenue in the gloaming of Sept. 11, 2021, the city twists the shiv a bit deeper by claiming that the parents should have known how dangerous it is to walk along a New York City street — a legal argument that at once seeks to hold the city blameless while also admitting that it is failing to keep the streets safe.
“Any and all risks, hazards, defects, and dangers … were of an open, obvious, apparent, and inherent nature, and were known or should have been known to plaintiff[s],” the city’s court papers claim (read them in full below).
