- Nashville, Atlanta, Phoenix, Las Vegas and North Carolina all rejected transit. Ridership dropped almost everywhere. Gas prices are down. Americans are buying more cars. Poorer people are being pushed out of city centers. Millennials are riding scooters or just walking. Overall, it’s been a bad year for transit. (Governing)
- The Stranger, Seattle’s alt-weekly, delves into the fight over whether Sound Transit should bury or elevate the Ballard-West Seattle light rail line.
- As traffic deaths soar, San Francisco is speeding up the approval process for new bike lanes and other road safety improvements. (Chronicle)
- Half of all Washington, D.C. traffic deaths this year have happened in a single ward, and Ward 8 residents are fed up. (DCist)
- Philadelphia police are cracking down on double-parkers and drivers in bus lanes in the the city center. (CBS 3)
- Charlotte’s Gold Line streetcar will be replaced by buses for the next year while an extension is built. (Spectrum News)
- Austin, Tex., is considering ticketing people who let their plants obstruct the sidewalk. (KXAN)
- The Charleston, S.C. city council allocated more than $20 million from a half-cent transportation sales tax to public transit. (WCBD)
- Amsterdam moped riders are mad that the city is forcing them out of bike lanes and into faster-moving traffic. (The Guardian)
- Spider-Man: threat or menace? (Narcity)
from the Amsterdam story in the Guardian, “Paul de Waal, a spokesman for the BOVAG transport retailers’ union, goes further and calls putting mopeds on the road a ‘dangerous, life-threatening experiment.It effectively blames one group of riders for all of the problems,’ he says, ‘and you haven’t solved the bike lane overload. We think it would be far better to widen the infrastructure for two-wheeled vehicles – at the expense of space for cars. The car isn’t holy, but nor are the cyclist or the pedestrian: you need to look at it all together.’
“There are a lot more types of bicycle like cargo and e-bikes, which go a lot faster, and Amsterdam’s narrow bike lanes aren’t built for them.” Katelijne Boerma, the bicycle mayor of Amsterdam, says the 100,000 people on bikes every weekday between 8am and 9am clearly do not have enough space. “If there’s a lack of space – which is the case for cyclists – then people start behaving badly and the bike lanes and a lot of pavements in the centre for pedestrians have a kind of ‘surviving the jungle’ attitude. We all need to work on our fietsfatsoen, which is an old-fashioned word for courtesy.”
At some point even Dutch cyclists, with the most extensive system of bike infrastructure in the world and a fairly compact country, will have to share urban roads, which would be safer with a maximum speed of 20 mph, at least in the curb lane of wider avenues.