Potholes, low cost solution, for pedestrian safety.

Pedestrians are essential for a low energy future. We need walkable cities so that fossil fuels can stay in the ground.

Yet the police cannot guarantee pedestrian safety since the job to monitor all the roads all the time is beyond their capability and broke cities are cutting services anyway. Distracted drivers continue to prowl the streets with immunity and are actually increasing in numbers. Caltrans and city have design goals that emphasize throughput, wider and faster streets, at the expense of life; which Context Sensitive Solutions is meant to solve but is not applied because of throughput!

That is why increasing potholes on most roads would be safer. Drivers would have to actually watch where they are going as they negotiate around potholes instead of bowling over pedestrians. This is a natural low cost way of addressing problems with access. Its a good thing we are broke and "our state roads have deteriorated." This editorial also says that congestion has worsened. But that is a different problem- a function of Caltrans throughput from the surrounding sprawl into the road challenged built out Bay Area.

Violence against cyclists symptomatic?

A fireman in Asheville NC shot a cyclist after he turned to leave an argument on safety. The cyclist was carrying a three year old in a child seat. The fireman thought it was unsafe to subject children to the dangers of auto traffic by transporting them on a bike. "Police said the driver, Charles Diez, claimed he was upset that the victim was bike riding with his child on the heavily traveled Tunnel Road."

I'm not sure how he thought the three year old would get home after the parent was killed. However the parent was not injured- amazingly the helmet stopped the bullet. But cyclists put up with violence regularly in how the roads are laid out and how they can get around. So is this incident an anomaly or a result of a violent system?

Is shooting a cyclist different than running the cyclist of the road or sideswiping or driving by too close ignorantly, or being distracted and killing them? Yes at least in how the law perceives it. And riding while poor carries its own penalties. The police will ignore the folder irrespective of how egregious the driving fault was because as they said in one recent case in NY they were too busy to follow up. Even threatening someone with death by car is your word against the driver unlike threatening them with a gun which can bring down every homeland security swat team in the region.

Just riding a bike has this violence associated with it that could be worse if we slip up by trying to avoid a pot hole or brick in the road without looking. On the road from Yellowstone to Glacier I hit a dead raccoon. The bike flew about five feet into the road and surprisingly landed upright. I corrected the front wheel and regained the shoulder. Ahead and behind me were logging trucks. What fortune do I owe for my brief inattention?

Socially we get used to the driver side violence from the war in Iraq and Afghanistan to the traffic in front of our homes. So when someone flips out its easy to think of them as illogical. Or irrational. Or a confusing blend of the two. Road rage, distracted driving, speeding are all defensible unlike waving a gun. Instead these incidents are a logical extension of an accepted pattern of violence.

Don't keep rewarding agressive driving

I ride my bicycle, but constantly risk being killed by lung destroying irresponsible motorists, driving aggressively, because government rewards them for saving time, to access sprawled out services, like doctors and schools spread out over large areas that should be open space and functioning creeks, with infrastructure that penalizes walkers and cyclists today, for some Clean Air Act fix in the future, like a TDA-3 over-crossing of Ralston at 101.

Bike boulevards every one mile would help walkers and bicyclists while deterring the near 100% infrastructure dedicated to aggressive driving.

restore the food shed on a walking perimeter

Peak everything around us. We have problem. So city leaders convene green committees. Green committees look around and think bikes and walking a no brainer since you don't have to be a doctor to know that you should take your heart for a walk.

But now the bigger problem. City leaders have spent the last 70 years chaining us to Al Queda and Saudi Arabia. As they have expanded roads and raised the speed limit to get to the development permitted in the outer reaches of their jurisdictions they have made walking impossible and bicycling dangerous. Self sufficiency is dangerous and illegal in places with no walking closures at some intersections. So dangerous that leaders like Sue Lempert and Coralin Fierebach now say that they will not attempt to bike on these road they labored decades to proudly build. They want separate bike paths- ceding the public space to Bush and Al Queda they want to go build a another network to get around slowly without pollution and in peace.

But how to grade separate this new facility? And connect community scattered to the outer reaches of the jurisdiction? It will be too expensive so we have to live with what we got. There is nothing to be done. One way is to move services into the neighborhoods on an 1/8 mile walking radius and then connect these centers via bicycles boulevards. Ideally if we have Transfer of Development Rights we restore the food shed on a walking perimeter and have a complete neighborhood.

The Bay Trail

Trails go over bridges
with names from the past

Cordilleras Creek, San Francisquito Creek
reminder of river valleys, river people, red wooded hillsides
coursing through us creasing the landscape.

Water tags to the past are calming
terrorizing moms with strollers, toddlers on trikes
plastic bags in the marsh the air damp with dust and diesel

Can't let the past slow us down
got appointments to make, shows to watch
socially speed is responsible.

A goose chick through the front wheel.
A child's gasp.
We are all crowded on this little trail.