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Thought Portal

@thoughtportal / thoughtportal.tumblr.com

A blog of the media I am consuming
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Sneckdown

The 99% Invisible City A Field Guide to the Hidden World of Everyday Design https://99percentinvisible.org/book/

A sneckdown (or snowy neckdown) is a temporary curb extension caused by snowfall, where snow has built up in the road but not been flattened by traffic, effectively reshaping the curb. Sneckdowns show how the space is being used by vehicle and foot traffic, and may reveal points where a street could be usefully narrowed with neckdowns to slow motor vehicle speeds and shorten pedestrian crossing distances.

The term was coined by Streetsblog founder Aaron Naparstek in 2014,[1][2] popularized by Streetfilms director Clarence Eckerson, Jr. and spread widely via social media.[3] Other Twitter hashtags that have been used to describe snow-based traffic-calming measures include #plowza, #slushdown, #snovered and #snowspace.[4]

In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, at Baltimore and 48th Street, a sneckdown-inspired permanent upgrade to the pedestrian environment was made in 2011.[5] In the 1980s, some planners in Australia distributed cake flour in intersections to observe patterns of vehicle movement hours later.[4]

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Researchers assumed that having more cyclists on the street was spurring drivers to slow down — a relic of a 2017 study that found that cities with high cycling rates had fewer traffic crashes. But it turned out that wasn’t the case.

Instead, researchers found that bike infrastructure, particularly physical barriers that separate bikes from speeding cars as opposed to shared or painted lanes, significantly lowered fatalities in cities that installed them.

After analyzing traffic crash data over a 13-year period in areas with separated bike lanes on city streets, researches estimated that having a protected bike facility in a city would result in 44 percent fewer deaths and 50 percent fewer serous injuries than an average city.

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over the course of several generations lawmakers rewrote the rules of American life to conform to the interests of Big Oil, the auto barons, and the car-loving 1 percenters of the Roaring Twenties. They gave legal force to a mind-set—let’s call it automobile supremacy—that kills 40,000 Americans a year and seriously injures more than 4 million more. Include all those harmed by emissions and climate change, and the damage is even greater. As a teenager growing up in the shadow of Detroit, I had no reason to feel this was unjust, much less encouraged by law. It is both.

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States face a looming deadline for “rescissions,” a routine budgetary practice where unspent portions of transportation funding must be returned to the federal government. Right now states have about $1 billions in unobligated biking and walking funds.

The problem is one of political will, says Caron Whitaker, the Bike League’s vice president for government relations. By comparison, very little money for highways is in danger of being lost to rescissions, she said.

“States in general are focused on building roads from one community to another and not the roads within a community,” she said. “So they use the highway money really fast.”

To make matters worse, the threat of defunding is occurring during a period of skyrocketing pedestrian deaths.

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