Kalamazoo cycling community grieving after hit-and-run driver kills five, injures four.

Good grief. Just another form of mass murder.

Kalamazoo cycling community grieving after hit-and-run driver kills five, injures four.

Just a few comments from over at Maddogmedia

khal spencer Says:
June 8, 2016 at 9:05 am | Reply
Why don’t deadly drivers get as much press as the crazy guy with the AK-47? These cyclists are just as dead.

• Patrick O'Grady Says:
  June 8, 2016 at 9:07 am This one’s getting some traction, K. The NYT just picked it up. Ditto The Guardian. And the Chicago Tribune, which means The Los Angeles Times should have it directly.
  
• Pat O'Brien Says:
  June 8, 2016 at 9:16 am Lots of talking on gun control. No talking on truck control. Can’t win an election talking about cell phone bans. Not sexy enough I guess. Almost an instant replay of the murder by truck in Tucson a few months ago. It’s not my fault officer. My boss called my cell phone just as I was snorting some coke.
  
• Patrick O'Grady Says:
  June 8, 2016 at 9:20 am “You can have my iPhone when you pry it from my cold, dead thumbs!”
  Here in New Mexico The Fear® is a constant companion. Everybody texts, at least half of the texters are drunk, and a drunk driver can collect DUIs like a dead dog collects flies and it doesn’t seem to keep him or her from sliding behind the wheel with a tallboy and the old “smart” phone.
  Plus even the sober drivers couldn’t give a runny shit about traffic laws. “Aggressively bad” is the only way to describe them. Worst drivers I’ve ever seen, and I’ve lived in two countries, 11 states and 19 towns. There should be a no-bag-limit hunting season on the sonsabitches.
  

“No one would design an urban roadway like this today”--Albuquerque City Councilor Pat Davis

On Friday, the Albuquerque Journal ran a front page story "New Mexico is No. 1 in pedestrian deaths". Sadly, the Journal seemed to swallow the standard line that this is due to drunkenness and jaywalking. Its as if the Journal is so inside the prevailing paradigm of "car is king" that it does not even ask if there are issues other than blaming the dead. For example, infrastructure design.

Certainly substance abuse is endemic in some parts of the Duke City and is a major problem as inebriated people walk or drive into each others paths. Likewise so-called jaywalking is a problem, but in part because we have built the infrastructure on the scale of fast cross city car travel rather than on the measure of where people live and where they may want to walk to their nearby destinations. We might as well post No Trespassing signs for those on foot on our urban rights of way. Albuquerque Councilor Pat Davis, quoted in the LA Monitor, nails the elephant in the room: no one would design streets this way if pedestrian (or bicyclist) safety were really crucial. I am sure that James Anderson, Roy Sekreta, Matt Trujillo, and others would agree, if they were alive to comment.

Streetsblog: The Problem With Treating Pedestrians Like Drivers.

Indeed, anyone who has spent any time in the Duke City, Santa Fe, or even Los Alamos knows that we design major arterials, including  Central Avenue in Albuquerque, Trinity Drive in Los Alamos, and Cerrillos, St. Michaels, or St. Francis in Santa Fe with wide, fast multilane features to facilitate motor vehicle movement with minimal delays--even in dense urban areas. Furthermore, the pedestrian safety features that the DOT adds to the design are often built at intervals that do not interfere with the vehicular level of service measures that are so critical to ensure that motorists can scurry back and forth between destinations in the ever sprawling American cityscape. NMDOT's refusal to add a crosswalk to NM 502 by the swimming pool on the east side of Los Alamos is an example. Likewise, fast speed limits ensure that anyone hit is likely to die while the wide "Stroad" profiles ensure small figures like bikers and peds are hard to see. See figure below for lethality vs speed.

From Literature Review on Vehicle Travel Speeds and Pedestrian Injuries, NHTSA

True human safety in our cities will only result from major changes in urban design. We cannot count on people slowing down when the roads beckon for speed. Instead, we need to engage in traffic calming so the road defines the speed rather than hanging useless signs that conflict with design. Vision Zero, if it is to be implemented, means redesigning roads so that they slow things down so that the inevitable crashes that result from human nature are not fatal. How that works with the ever present urge to sprawl our cities and pander to Level of Service is a good question.

Ain't it nice to ride in the Country?
Finally, months after surgery, I am actually getting my hind end out on the road again.
Nice, quiet roads. Fortunately.

Excerpted from Streetsblog, where  Bill Lindeke talks about St. Paul, MN:
Finding the Political Will to Fix “Four-Lane Death Roads” 

"...The key to a “vision zero” policy will be in making exactly the kinds of trade-off decisions that I’ve described here. A commitment to the safety of urban streets needs to say that no amount of automobile efficiency is worth the lives of people like Elizabeth Dunham, who was simply trying to cross the street. No amount of increased speeds are worth running over a kid like 11-year-old Bikram Phuyel, who was hit by a driver while crossing Rice Street to get to school in 2014. No amount of LOS improvement is worth the life of Kunlek Wangmo, hit by a turning driver while crossing St. Clair Avenue with her husband by West 7th Street last year. Or Shelby Kokesch, who was killed while walking her mother from the History Center across Kellogg Boulevard earlier this year. The list goes on… “Vision Zero” needs to start focusing on these kinds of difficult street design changes, and road diets are the least expensive, most effective option on the table..."

Requiescat in pace

Northbound Los Alamos Canyon Bridge Sidepath Bike Diversion Finished

That bit of sidewalk connecting the sidewalk to West Road 
in the center  of the photo may encourage people to merge 
into traffic and cross to get on the northbound bike lane. 
In theory, anyway.

  As mentioned to me by several bicyclists, Public Works put in the bit of sidewalk/sidepath that will enable bicyclists headed northbound on the bridge sidewalk to merge with West Road traffic and get onto the northbound bike lanes on Diamond Drive. This is preferable to riding into the crosswalk and dodging motor traffic. It is also preferable to riding contraflow on the sidewalk or worse yet, swimming salmon in the southbound bike lane for extended distances (I've seen all three). Let's hope people use it. When you use it, please send your comments this way. We (since I am on the T-Board, I'll make this plural) would like to know how it works out.

Many thanks to DPW director Philo Shelton and his staff for pushing on this. As I have said, the devils are in the details as far as bike infrastructure. At least two people have been nailed here when riding into the crosswalk, and maybe this will add a bit of safety to the northbound cyclist.

Final note. I rode over the bridge sidewalk on my way back from a Sunday ride to check whether the traffic light triggered for me (there were no motorists on West Road or exiting from the Med Center).. It did. Secondly, I could coast northbound on the bridge sidewalk, with that nice downhill slope, at over 25 mph, admittedly on Vittoria Open Pros. That is too fast to ride on a 7 foot wide bidirectional sidepath where there is no exit strategy while on the bridge. Please keep the speed reasonable and prudent when there are other users around.My personal rule of thumb is 10 mph.

Federal (FHWA) Performance Measures Ignore Bicycling

Time to raise Hell with government again.

Here is the link to the League of American Bicyclists post on proposed FHWA rules. There is an internal link on that page to send a NastyGram to the Feds. Please do so.

What follows is my letter to Transportation Secretary Fox.

Dear Transportation Secretary Fox

I am writing to endorse the comments submitted to Docket # FHWA-2013-0020 by the League of American Bicyclists.

I believe that performance measures on our transportation system should include measures that reflect all users - including bicyclists and pedestrians. Specifically I'd like to comment on three of the performance measures in this rule.

National Highway System (NHS) Performance
In the FAST Act, Congress made clear that states must consider all modes and users in the building and reconstruction of NHS projects. However, this rule proposes to measure reliability of the system by travel time for motor vehicles ONLY.

The reliability of the NHS must include a measure for ALL users. For bicyclists and pedestrians reliability should be measured by safe access on NHS roads using metrics that use sound bicycle transportation engineering methodologies.

Congestion Mitigation
The rule proposes that congestion mitigation be measured by delay for drivers. It fails to measure people not adding to that congestion because they are biking, walking or taking transit.  Also, if congestion mitigation means building more travel lanes, this has always been shown to be a long term failure. We need to change the modes, not cater to single occupant vehicle operators.

Many states and metropolitan areas have goals to reduce congestion by reducing vehicle miles traveled and/or to increase mode share for bicycling, walking and transit use. To make this rule more compatible with these goals, a new measure should be added to account for people traveling by modes that reduce congestion: HOVs, transit, bicycling and walking.

Mobile Source Emissions
I support the inclusion of greenhouse gas emissions both from tailpipes and from construction of new projects. The transportation system is responsible for 23 percent of the country's emissions, and in order to meet the goals and commitments made at the Paris COP we need to start measuring and reducing emissions. In addition, high GHG emissions will undoubtedly correlate with other emissions that are of an immediate health effect such as ground level ozone.

I appreciate the opportunity to comment on the rule, and support the move to a performance-based transportation system.

I hope the final performance measures will reflect the Secretary's leadership to serve all users of the transportation system.

Thank you very much.

Till they pry the car keys from my cold, dead, hands

 “The ultimate answer to healing and redeeming the world will not come from any government policy change—it will only come from a personal heart change,”

Dr. Joel Hunter, Pastor, Northland Church

“The ultimate answer to healing and redeeming the world will not come from any government policy change—it will only come from a personal heart change,” - See more at: http://www.pastorjoelhunter.com/#sthash.s3dwTmW1.dpuf

“The ultimate answer to healing and redeeming the world will not come from any government policy change—it will only come from a personal heart change,” - See more at: http://www.pastorjoelhunter.com/#sthash.s3dwTmW1.dpuf

Another kid shot in Albuquerque, non fatal, this time a five year old. Immediate tweet by NMTPGV about needing a Child Access Prevention Law. I wish I could say such laws would help. We have tons of laws out there and a severe shortage of common sense.

Unfortunately, I doubt these kids would be saved by laws alone. We still kill about ten times as many kids via car accidents than we do with gun accidents--with roughly the same number of cars and guns in circulation, cars seem ten times more likely to cause an accident killing a kid. Probably because they are used more often in the public space. That is in spite of licensing and registering cars, licensing and testing drivers, with myriads of laws regulating driving, and with tons and tons of public service announcements about driving safety. You can put a kid in a car seat, but that doesn't do shit to save the kid crossing the street or riding his bike when some speeding moron runs a red light. Driving while oblivious should be a crime.

Unfortunately, with both these instruments of the devil, we get mixed messages. We hear a lot about the 2A right to bear arms, but that doesn't mean common sense gun safety sinks in, i.e., if your kids are home alone, are the guns secured so they will not become inadvertent toys?  Have you taken a basic gun safety class? Are your kids trained to be wary of firearms? Is that gun under the pillow more likely to kill your kid than shoot an intruder? Is that AR locked up and if so, who has the keys?  In the case of cars, the public fights red light cameras and lower speed limits as hotly as the NRA fights gun laws. We build roads to handle high capacity at high level of service (i.e., Diamond Drive, Trinity Drive) even if this encourages speeding and puts vulnerable users at risk. We sell ponderous SUVs with high capacity engines that allow you to drive at double the speed limit, and then load them up with distraction devices. (For anyone asking why anyone needs an AR-15 with a 30 rd clip, why does anyone need a 420 HP Cadillac Escalade?) Traffic violation penalties are a laugh compared to those in parts of Europe. We put schools at the outskirts of town and design towns with arterial and cul de sac development that encourages congestion and speeding. Kids get obesity related disease because after we screw up the infrastructure, we are worried about them riding or walking to school.

I don't think laws will help much unless the underlying culture changes. Not sure what will drive that culture change. Perhaps as more upscale younger people move back to higher density development and start walking and biking, there will be a political sea change to safer communities. Until then, go to hell with your cold, dead, hands.