Very important finding on crosswalks, yield rates, and speed.

At 20 mph, 3 out of every 4 drivers yield to a pedestrian in the basic crosswalk.

At just 30 mph, that rate drops to 1 in 8 drivers. High visibility crosswalks (HVCs) fare slightly better.

At 20 mph, the yield rate rises to nearly 90%, but is still only 25% at 30 mph.

While that latter is double the rate at basic crosswalks, it still represents a high failure rate of these "traffic control devices."

Cities:
"We must address climate change, but our streets are failing, and people are struggling to pay rent."

Also cities:
"The main plank of our Climate Action Plan is universal adoption of a $50k car that's twice as heavy." Just to draw this out a little more clearly, battery electric cars are much more massive. E.g. the *battery alone* in an f-150 lightning weighs as much as a small car.

It's the July edition of #NorthBayNotes, my ongoing series documenting Marin by bicycle!

I literally just never get tired of Tam. A poignant note about a friend who, it seems, died by suicide from the RSR Bridge. I suppose this is a sad consequence of the multi-use pathway.

The Golden Gate Bridge has seen hundreds of millions in funding for the suicide deterrent system, but no program exists for the RSR.

A reminder that drunk driving does not cause traffic deaths.

Neither do cell phones, red light running, failure to yield, or even breaking the speed limit.

No, as any ER professional will tell you, what *causes* traffic deaths is blunt force trauma.

🧵 The key word there is "force."

The human body (namely, the brain and vital organs) can only experience so much of it and survive.

There is a maximum limit that we need to prevent people from experiencing if we want to keep everyone alive.

There are so many absolutely wild facts in this piece about distracted driving and in-vehicle infotainment systems.

In short, the distraction is coming from *inside the car.*

latimes.com/business/story… I haven't owned a car since the '03 Corolla I sold in 2015 (which was decidedly analog) so I don't think about infotainment systems much.

But as this piece describes, we're baking in distraction, in a way that people might not realize.

It's been a couple weeks since I got back from my Netherlands bike tour.

Now that I've had some time to reflect, I'm going to start posting my thoughts on the experience.

First up, the bikes of the Netherlands!

🧵 This thread is for the bike nerds out there, but I hope everyone can get something out of it.

The standard Dutch bicycle has several features that set it apart.

While all of these features are found on some US bikes, their consistency in the Dutch bicycle is striking.

I've always been bothered by the classic urbanist Powerpoint slide showing "this is how much space people take up walking/biking/busing/driving."

While illustrative, it has several flaws that actually undermine its important message.

🧵 First, it downplays the role that right-of-way *width* plays.

Note that while a bus and the bikes take up 2-4 car lengths, they only take up 1 car width.

They could have lined up the 56 cars, but then the photo wouldn't work, because the queue would be 1/4 mile long.

Guys, I've found a car that I support 100%.

The Dutch Canta is available to disabled folks and can drive on cyclepaths.

drivetribe.com/p/this-ridicul…

Imagine if, tomorrow, everyone at the Williamsburg Trader Joe's was forced to shop with a full-sized cart.

No matter how urgent their trip, or how few groceries they needed, they had to take up the maximum amount of floor space.

This is our city on cars.
🧵 Next time you're at the grocery store, look around.

Especially if you're in a city, or a neighborhood with many students, you'll see people shopping with canvas bags, baskets, granny carts.

These are pedestrians, bikes, and buses of the grocery world.

A fact that goes underappreciated in the bike advocacy community:

To make our cities bikeable, we need to reform land use.

🧵 The bicycle is an excellent tool for trips in the 1-3 mile range. This translates to a 7-20 minute bike ride (assuming a flat road).

At these distances, the bike is far more practical than walking, and typically beats a car, when parking is taken in account.

It looks like all of LA is on the 405 right now.

But...how many people is this? And, better yet, how many trains would it take to move them?

Let's do the math.

🧵

https://twitter.com/KTLA/status/1463357141822029824

We're looking at the interchange of I-405 and I-10 in Los Angeles, facing south.

When we zoom out, we see a full view of I-405 from Ohio Ave to Sepulveda Blvd, a distance of 5.8 miles, or ~30,500 feet.

This is almost *too obvious* to notice, but the reason that paint works to delineate lanes for cars is that drivers *carry their own physical protection.*

They don't need walls between them and other cars traveling in the same direction because their car has walls. People on bikes carry no such armor, meaning paint and soft, plastic delineators do not...do anything.

If you don't feel safe in a paint-only bike lane, it's because you're not.

This is the first installment of #NorthBayNotes, Dispatches from Marin County by Bicycle.

The ongoing series will be things I notice, fun and frustrating, exciting and exasperating, while riding around the county I work in. This is Nick. He rides an electric tricycle and told me he doesn't even need a car.

Many days he rides up to 20 miles, though the battery is good for 50+. He was generous enough to let me stop him and chat.

Driving works best when only a few people are doing it.

But we've designed a system where driving is pretty much the only viable option.

Raise your hand if you see the problem here. This is why so much NIMBYism is traffic-based.

People see the traffic we have today and imagine that twice as many people will mean twice the traffic, so they feel they have no choice but to say "no."

Personal confession:

One of the reasons am such a jerk about texting and driving is that, when I was 22, I totalled my car doing exactly that.

I've only told this to a couple people.
🧵 This was in 2009, i.e. before smartphones.

I was going to frisbee practice and pulling up to a light. My phone buzzed with a text and, as I slowed down, I checked who it was from.

I thought I had space between me and the next car but I looked up just as I crashed into it.

On a zoom weminar hosted by @CalBike with renowned bike researchers John Pucher and @buehler_ralph on international international comparisons in biking!

🧵 Here is the share of trips made by bike across North America, Europe, and Japan. Huge variation across countries, with English speaking nations lagging behind.

6,000+ miles of riding over my three years in the Bay.

All my bikers out there, what do you notice? Super true! SPA is a huge block hole my map. 9th St and California sort of work, but have their own issues (and no fronting commercial for me to actually use!)

https://twitter.com/AdamTigar/status/1447992021839278082

Lease popular bike opinion: e-bike motors should cut out at 15 mph.

https://twitter.com/verge/status/1447940290589904898

Dumb typos. I shouldn't be tweeting during meetings.

Excellent article about the century-old fight, lost to history, to keep cars out of Golden Gate Park.

sfchronicle.com/oursf/article/… There's so much interesting stuff here.

The first person arrested for speeding in SF was driving on the Great Highway!

I'm not often surprised at how much space parking takes up. But, I just read the SFMTA 2014 Parking Census and...um...wow.

If you lined up the on-street parking spaces in San Francisco, it would be longer than *the state of California.* If you include the publicly available off-street parking (setting aside every garage, apartment, and private lot), the line of parking would stretch...

...from San Francisco to Minneapolis.

The first step to reducing VMT is to...

...stop every project that increases VMT. There will always be "just one more project" to do.

There's always a chokepoint that "needs" widening, a winding segment that "needs" straightening, or a freeway interchange that "needs" an additional connection.