signs??
Posted on 07/31/2018 11:00:36 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Once again, the oh-so progressive, oh-so enlightened Seattle City Council is showing the rest of the country what not to do. The idealistic leftists who control the Council are wasting millions of hard-earned taxpayer dollars in failed attempts to solve problems the Council members created.
All this is turning Seattle into the poster city for the failure of Big Government. The city best known for fish markets, coffee stores, rain and flannel-wearing musicians is now becoming legendary for its incompetent leadership and its financial boondoggles.
The latest example of Seattle senselessness is the Council’s costly and deeply flawed efforts to get more people riding public transportation and bicycles. Other than spending lots of money, this effort isn’t accomplishing anything.
Seattle was one of the first cities to get electric streetcars in the U.S., with the first electric car entering service in 1889. With over a century of experience, you would think the city would know how to handle public transit. Not so. Taxpayers are paying a big price for the incompetence of city officials.
The public transportation system in Seattle is a mess. Construction costs for new and upgraded streetcar and light rail lines are skyrocketing well above estimated costs.
One of the more unbelievable mistakes made was the purchase of 10 new streetcars last fall. Apparently, when the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) ordered the cars no one thought to check the measurements.
The order was placed for street cars that are likely too big for the tracks and the maintenance barn. The project is already $50 million over budget, not including the $52 million it cost for the 10 cars that may be useless. How has no one been fired for this?
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
signs??
It’s not about infrastructure, it’s about getting money to your buddies and back into your pocket.
Here in Western Colorado it hardly ever rains; and we have miles and miles of bike lanes. Practically no one uses them. Total waste.
Most of us live in cities and suburbs. Good traffic design can minimize most conflicts. Through automobile traffic can stay on the high speed roads. Pedestrians and cyclists will naturally tend to stick to quieter side streets. Problems arise when arterial roads don't have adequate and logical crossings, so that they become barriers to lateral movement. Problems arise when cul-de-sac type development forces everyone onto the arterial roads to move from one neighborhood to another. Problems arise when sidewalks and shoulders get sacrificed to create new traffic lanes, and no replacements are provided. Road builders need to include such considerations in their planning.
I don't know whether the term "complete roads" is still in use, but it fits. It's pitiful to drive through a new suburban development where kids can't walk or bike outside of their little cul-de-sac to the pool a half mile away, because the designers have flushed all traffic onto the arterial, high speed road, which lacks a sidewalk.
In rural areas, bikes and cars can generally share country roads without too much trouble. The problem arises when urban sprawl starts to encroach. If an area is starting to urbanize, it's best to take a very long view and build a pedestrian, hiking, biking infrastructure from the start. If a rural road, long shared by everyone, is going to be turned into a commuter racetrack, include an off-road trail as part of the deal. The area will fill up soon enough.
Long term planning is important. Protect the stream corridors. Look 50 or 100 years ahead on parks and recreation; an area may still look rural today, but in 20 years parents will be spending endless hours driving to distant soccer fields because planners didn't anticipate growth. Recognize that a robust hiking and biking infrastructure will be invaluable when the area densifies, and it's much cheaper and easier to plan for it from the start than to retrofit it later, after you've created another urban sprawl, strip mall disaster. Everything doesn't have to be built at once, but don't build suburban roads that effectively foreclose other options and trap everyone in their cars from the moment they leave their own driveways.
I think that incompetence reigns throughout the entire liberal transportation scheme supply chain.
Several years ago, I worked for a company that was approached by a light rail car manufacturer about using our products on their cars.
I’m not an engineer but was constantly finding problems that their engineers failed to find.
Several years later, these same idiots called back threatening to sue us to the tune of $100,000 per car because our product failed.
Over the course of a couple conference calls, I figured out about 8 things they did wrong and against our written instructions and those of some other vendors.
I finally said “If you had done it the way we told you, we wouldn’t be having this conversation would we?” That shut them right down and they went away.
A few months ago, I was talking with a guy who was a consulting engineer on the project and was in the conference call. He told me that he saw one of the rail engineers and my name came up. They still hate me. Oh well.
The whole intent of the rail systems, whether it is lite rail or California’s high-speed rail is to transfer taxpayer money to favored Democrat controlled enterprises through which it is laundered back into Democrat coffers.
And it has been fabulously successful at that.
Actually getting something useful built was never part of the plan.
Not just rails and not just Dems, all politicians throw taxpayer money at public works for union votes and donations from the engineers and other companies that get the contracts. and, most of these "public works" are either unnecessary or over priced.
The same leftist boondoggle is happening in Maine where taxpayers are forced to pay for AMTRACK service that has been expanded up the coast of maine.
No one uses it. There is a better private coach company.
Nothing compared to HART in Honolulu.
Denver is busy installing bike lanes, taking away streets. They’ve decided they want to kill off ALL motor vehicle traffic in downtown Denver.
Also notice that all light rail are spoke and hub to and from Denver and not between other areas.
There needs to be a limit on geographic area voting. Large cities have more representation in legislative bodies so they scarf up all the funds for transportation.
Until they run out of taxpayers money - then what?
True, but then the automobile came along.
Streets and roads accommodated ALL forms of traffic, and the dominant mode was pedestrian. Then came the car, which moved at speeds hazardous to everyone else. So here we are.
Here we are.
Forget bicycles for a moment. Think of pedestrians. People should be able to move around their own neighborhoods safely.
That's why we have sidewalks and pedestrian underpasses and overpasses. That's why we have "WALK" signs, crosswalks, and laws to yield to pedestrians.
What we don't have are pedestrians attempting to walk in the middle of street lanes of opposing traffic attempting to compete with automobile traffic.
But bicyclists do - with often terrible consequences.
Too many suburbanites live in communities that require them to get into their cars to do anything and everything; they've lost sight of how good urban neighborhoods live.
This is not an 'urban vs. suburban' debate. I have lived in both, big cities and in the suburbs. I have seen cyclist create problems in both.
So: it should be part of basic road design that we build sidewalks and ample pedestrian crossings. With minimal upgrades, sidewalks and pedestrian crossings can accommodate bikes as well. On rural roads, have good shoulders; this is proper design for automobiles as well, but it also accommodates pedestrian and bike traffic.
Roads are generally between 8.2 to 10.7 feet in cities, and up to 12 feet wide on highways.
In every city, there are roads where it is impossible to build separate areas to accommodate cyclists without taking out pedestrian areas, or taking away automotive lanes that will create snarling traffic jams and/or make the traffic situation work.
We are dealing with basic physics here as well.
Unless you want to outlaw automobile traffic, cyclists are an inherent detriment to the regular, safe, and smooth flow of automobile traffic. They are less mass, less velocity, and harder to see. Period. The two are unequal competitors for the same resources.
Local situations will vary, but around DC one of the biggest problems is roads on which the shoulders and sidewalks were long ago sacrificed to squeeze in another traffic lane. Planners took the existing sidewalk, spent a bazillion dollars a mile putting in a new car lane, and deemed a replacement sidewalk "too expensive." Planners took a city street in an urban neighborhood and turned it into a high speed commuter sewer, risky to cross even if it's not fenced. This kind of thing kills neighborhoods and produces slums.
For every anecdote, there is another anecdote.
Bike lanes continue to create problems for commuters
Want to put a new arterial road through a residential neighborhood? Ok … provided you have a stoplight and a safe crossing every two blocks, put in a wide sidewalk for neighborhood traffic including pedestrians, bikes, moms with strollers and the joggers and dogwatchers, don't eliminate the on-street parking for local merchants, etc. I.e., don't destroy other people's neighborhoods.
Who is talking about not wanting to have resources and planning for pedestrians, dog walkers, or parking?
I stated that cyclists cause inherent problems due to differential speed and other factors. And they do.
Your commute is too long? Live closer to your job.
????????????
My commute is not long (I never even mentioned that, don't know why you brought that up), and as I have stated - I have lived in both city and suburban environments.
Why should anybody be fired? Their intentions were good. That's all that counts in Liberal Land.
this is the usual leftard idiocy
basic negligence. the people involved should be fired (but somehow wont be).
Our biggest problems are the 1960/70's era suburbs (the beltway suburbs) that were built by people with car-on-the-brain syndrome. About the same time, many established urban neighborhoods were also degraded in the interest of accommodating commuters. This was the period when sidewalks and shoulders on arterial roads disappeared in favor of new traffic lanes. It was the period when bridges were routinely built without sidewalks, so no one could cross except in a car. As a result, yes, some bicyclists ride on inappropriate roads and cause problems. In most instances, however, a bicyclist on an inappropriate road is not there because he wants to be. He's there because he's trying to get from Point A to Point B, and he's hit a chokepoint or barrier that forces him onto an inappropriate road to bridge a gap between safe biking routes.
Situations will vary greatly from one city to another, but around here, a lot of the action in the bicycling planning wars has to do with bridging these gaps. We have the makings of a pretty good biking system, with some terrific nationally known trails as major backbones (e.g., the Mt. Vernon Trail, the C&O Canal, Rock Creek, Sligo Creek, the Anacostia Trail network, the Capitol Crescent, the Washington & Old Dominion, etc.). But if you study the biking maps closely, you will find that many of these trail systems don't link up at all, or are theoretically linked via ridiculously long circuitous routes. In addition, in some areas, neighborhoods are built in such a way that people can't easily reach major bike routes from their own homes; there should be bikeable neighborhood routes -- sidewalks if necessary -- to allow people to get safely to the trails. Most residential neighborhoods are walkable and bikeable, with quiet tree-lined streets and light traffic. Downtown is a different animal; dedicated bike lanes will be necessary there, and should be protected where possible. Every street doesn't need to be bikeable, but planners must think in terms of a coherent network that allows people to actually get around town and reach major points of interest via safe routes. That's what will get them out of cars.
If it were up to me, I'd have all members of city and county councils, and all transportation planners, criss-cross an area on foot and on bikes before finalizing any major new transportation plans. Let them ride a few ten mile detours because they didn't provide a way to get across a major highway, or because they didn't want to budget for a sidewalk along a major highway. A lot of these irritations can be avoided at minimal cost if people are just sensitized to the issue.
To reduce it to a minimalist formula: build a blankety-blank sidewalk, and make sure there are plenty of safe crossings of arterial roads. Don't let roads become barriers. Sidewalks and stoplights would solve most of the problem.
The way I figured it was if your going to spend that kind of money. Build something that is different. Like a elevated monorail system. That way you don’t have to buy up all this valuable property and displace so many people.. Nope they built a ground place rail system instead of a elevated monorail. Also they built the rail system elevated where property values were cheaper and less populated..
#14 You ever notice you do not see any women riding bikes?
Just a bunch of guys..... did I spell guys right?
That is actually demographic voting. Geographic voting would be more like, for example, having 1 representative per county in a legislative house. In such a house, Denver would have very little representation.
Over the last few weeks we have had many days over 100 degrees. No one with a brain bikes from noon to five when it is that hot.
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