Free Republic

Why don’t more people of color ride bikes? There is no singular reason; however, safety is often cited as a primary concern. In communities of color with a high concentration of low to middle-income residents, the lack of cycling infrastructure elements, such as bike trails, bike lanes, or even shoulders, make cycling unsafe and impractical. “The lower a metro area’s median household income, the more dangerous it’s streets are likely to be for people walking,” according to a Smart Growth America Dangerous by Design 2021 report. “This is unsurprising, given low-income communities are less likely to have sidewalks, marked crosswalks,...

Picture Pittsburgh 50 years from now with these transportation changes: a terminal in a central location to handle a hyperloop system, vehicles for vertical takeoffs and landings, and high-speed trains; aerial trams linking neighborhoods; and new bridges crossing the Monongahela River at Hazelwood for motorized vehicles and at the former Wabash rail bridge piers for bikes and pedestrians. Those might sound like something from a science fiction novel, but they are among the ideas the city says it must consider in a 50-year Mobility Vision Plan released Thursday by Mayor Bill Peduto and Karina Ricks, director of the city’s Department...

The Orlando area continues to lock down its rank as the most dangerous place in the nation for pedestrians. “Still number one,” said Rayla Bellis, primary author of the 2021 Dangerous By Design report that analyzes the nation’s pedestrian deaths and compares statistics of metro areas and states. Orlando and a few other cities had slightly better numbers in the new report than in one two years ago. “These places were so dangerous to begin with that even seeing these improvements, they are still rising to the top,” Bellis said. The report by the pedestrian-safety advocacy groups Smart Growth America...

New York City transportation authorities have inflicted lots of bike lanes on locations where they are particularly inappropriate. But for sneering, arrogant disregard — make that contempt — for the surroundings, none can equal the plan for a “protected” bike lane along Midtown’s Sixth Avenue from West 35th Street to Central Park South this year. . . . . [T]he Sixth Avenue lane raises the bar for malicious streetscape tampering. A bike lane right on the doorsteps of Manhattan’s most vital office towers seems willfully spiteful — a thumb in the eye of profit-making capitalism with a slap at the...

Forget “economic justice,” climate change and foreign policy. The big issue for America if Michael Bloomberg wins the presidency is: Will he install bike lanes on Interstate highways? Maybe you scoff. Of course our former mayor and his transportation sidekick Janette Sadik-Khan couldn’t possibly inflict their cycling mania from sea to shining sea. But back when Bloomberg took office in 2002, the idea that the Big Apple might one day be crisscrossed with space-hogging bike lanes seemed ridiculous. Today, the city has 1,260 traffic-snarling miles of them. They’re a barrel of fun for cycling enthusiasts, a tiny minority of New...

Taxpayer watchdog group: Emails show sales tax revenue going toward projects that are ‘not what most voters have in mind’..[ full title] ... A Colorado Springs tax watchdog group obtained communications between city employees that show discussion of using sales tax revenue for traffic reduction and bike lane infrastructure while other city officials have denied that’s where funds would be directed. City voters approved a road improvement ballot measure called 2C in 2015, which is up for renewal in the Nov. 5 election. 2C is a 0.62 percent sales tax increase that is supposed to be dedicated to road maintenance...

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...

A coalition of local leaders backed by the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce wants voters to approve a sales tax increase on the November ballot to pay for projects like the widening of Interstate 25 and the buildout of bike lanes. The group filed four ballot measures with the Secretary of State on Thursday that would raise between $500 million and $1 billion for transportation projects, according to the chamber, and allow that money to be used to pay for bonds, which would generate even more upfront cash. A booming population across the Front Range has created traffic snarls on...

WASHINGTON — Expanding and extending Beltway toll lanes over the Potomac River sooner, delays and changes to D.C. Streetcar plans, and changes to widening plans for a number of roads across the region. Those are some of the transportation projects that moved forward to be part of long-range plans that can actually be constructed in coming years. Other projects accepted Wednesday as having the funding to move forward include an additional lane by 2025 on Interstate 95 south just across the Occoquan River to exit 160, and a plan to widen Route 15 from Battlefield Parkway to Montresor Road near...

--SNIP-- Today the bicycle is a mixed bag, usually with more negatives than positives. In many cities, bike lanes now consume more road space than they free up, they add to pollution as well as reducing it, they hurt neighbourhoods and business districts alike, and they have become a drain on the public purse. The bicycle today — or rather the infrastructure that now supports it — exemplifies “inappropriate technology,” a good idea gone wrong through unsustainable, willy-nilly top-down planning. London, where former mayor Boris Johnston began a “cycling revolution,” shows where the road to ruin can lead. Although criticism...

<p>Tweefie Millspaugh has a relatively short commute from her home in North Baltimore's Abell neighborhood to her job at a downtown law firm. Without traffic, she says, it takes about 15 minutes.</p> <p>But lately, the 54-year-old has found herself yelling fruitlessly in the driver's seat as she sits for 45 minutes on streets jammed by road closures across the city's center. After work, she waits again in a crawling line before finally inching out of her parking garage and into the gridlock.</p>

My favorite response was from a woman with a funny name -- one of those names where the alphabet got tossed up in the air -- who told me that she bicycles to and from work, to any event, social or otherwise, to the store, what have you. Really? You ride your bike to social events? Don't you get sweaty? I'm wondering what would constitute a social event that you could ride your bike to. Let's say you're going to an art museum charity fundraiser. Do you wear a dress? Valet park? I'm not buying that, any more than I...

A fibrosis of bicycle lanes is spreading through the cities of the world. The well-being of innocent motorists is threatened as traffic passageways are choked by the spread of dull whirs, sharp whistles and sanctimonious pedal-pushing. Bike lanes have appeared in all the predictable places—Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Berkeley and Palo Alto. But the incidence of bike lanes is also on the rise in unlikely locales such as slush-covered Boston, rain-drenched Vancouver, frozen Montreal and Bogotá, Colombia (where, perhaps, bicycles have been given the traffic lanes previously reserved for drug mules). Even Dublin, Ireland, has had portions of its streets set aside...

... San Francisco can't even install new bike racks. Blame Rob Anderson. At a time when most other cities are encouraging biking as green transport, the 65-year-old local gadfly has stymied cycling-support efforts here by arguing that urban bicycle boosting could actually be bad for the environment. That's put the brakes on everything from new bike lanes to bike racks while the city works on an environmental-impact report. ... Cars always will vastly outnumber bikes, he reasons, so allotting more street space to cyclists could cause more traffic jams, more idling and more pollution. Mr. Anderson says the city has...