2022 Summer Links - Cities, Counties, and Transportation
15 Oct 2022
You might have noticed that I haven’t posted anything here in a while. You might also be wondering why that is. The short version is that I had a busy summer. We did a lot of camping, had a lot of family time, and got a lot of things done.
To spare you a massive update with way too many links (and to break the task into something manageable), I’m sorting the links into a few categories that I’ll post separately. This one is going to have all of the stuff that gets sorted into something like “Urban Planning” in my head. Of course, I’m more interested in Rural Planning and transportation than cities, since I don’t live in a city and really, cities aren’t what we need to figure out right now (low density sprawl and how to traverse it is). Without further ado, have some tasty links:
- Another article about Land Value Tax. It would be hard for it to live up to the hype, with sompe people presenting it as a one-step solution to all of our problems, but the housing crisis we’re in the middle of certainly makes a compelling case that there’s probalby something messed up with our incentive structures and LVT would likely be a step in the right direction.
- A good article on why the Manual of Uniform Traffice Control Devices needs to be rewritten.
- Apparently Hoboken, New Jersey, of all places, is doing surprisingly well on the Vision Zero front. This is really important. If you are talking to your local elected officials (in the US) pointing to a place in New Jersy that they have heard of before is going to be way more effective than, say, Copenhagen. Heck, New Jersey often gets made fun of, so it even has a bit of a challenge to it, “You’re telling me that we can’t do better than New Jersey?”.
- Although it’s easy to make fun of Vehicle Into Building crashes (that house wouldn’t have been hit if were wearing a hi-viz vest; that convenience store was probably using its cell phone when it stepped out into traffic), the idea that 2,500 people in the USA die each year from them is horrifying. And apparently we don’t even really know just how bad the situation is, since they aren’t consistently reported. It would be easy to blame this all on driver error, but I would argue that if that many people are driving into buildings on a regular basis, we need to be looking at our roads so we can figure out if there’s a way to design them so that people, you know, stay on them and don’t drive into buildings. Finally, you may be thinking of this as someone accidentally having their vehicle in the wrong gear when pulling out of a parking spot, but I’m not sure how you get 2,500+ fatalities from people hitting convenience stores at 5mph.
- We have a tendency in our culture to blame homelessness on personal choices. That argument falls apart when you look at housing prices, though. Here in Olympia, the median house price has risen from about $300,000 to about $500,000 (66%) in 5 years. That translates to a whole lot of people who can no longer afford a house, and the rental market is just as bad, with the median 2 bedroom apartment being more than $1,600. The result is that our broken housing market is pushing people into homelessness.
- Outside has an article asking “What should happen to drivers who hit cyclists?” that is worth a read. I plan on writing more about this once I get a chance to read There Are No Accidents by Jessie Singer. In podcasts I have heard Singer talk about how when something bad happens we have a choice between punishing the driver and preventing it from happening again, but that we can’t do both. Right now I feel like we, as a society, should be more willing to take away a person’s drivers license when they demonstrate that they can’t operate a vehicle safely, and that we should have mandatory written tests as a condition of renewing your license every 5-10 years.
