Be Like Hoboken

That is 8 on the list of things that I never expected to say.

But I am saying this, and I mean it, because the densely populated town near the New Jersey terminus of the Holland Tunnel has had no traffic fatalities for the past 7 years.

This appears to be a direct consequence of consciously reducing the available parking in the city. (Obviously correlation is not causation, yadda, yadda, yadda)

Street parking was already scarce in Hoboken, New Jersey, when the death of an elderly pedestrian spurred city leaders to remove even more spaces in a bid to end traffic fatalities.

For seven years now, the city of nearly 60,000 people has reported resounding success: Not a single automobile occupant, bicyclist or pedestrian has died in a traffic crash since January 2017, elevating Hoboken as a national model for roadway safety.

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Bhalla became mayor in 2018 and the city fully committed to Vision Zero: a set of guidelines adopted by numerous cities, states and nations seeking to eliminate traffic deaths. Proponents believe no accident is truly unavoidable and even want to do away with the word “accident” altogether when describing roadway fatalities.

Sweden originated the concept more than a quarter-century ago, and U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg touted Hoboken in 2022 when announcing his department would follow Vision Zero guidelines. Major U.S. cities including New York, Minneapolis, San Francisco, Baltimore and Portland, Oregon, have integrated aspects of the program into their safety plans, including at least some form of daylighting, the term for the removal of parking spaces near intersections to improve visibility.

………

While Hoboken’s plan has numerous components, including lower speed limits and staggered traffic lights, daylighting is often credited as one of the biggest reasons its fatalities have dropped to zero.

Ryan Sharp, the city’s transportation director, said when roads need to be repaved, Hoboken takes the additional step of cordoning off the street corners to widen curbs and shorten crosswalks. It’s already illegal to park at an intersection in Hoboken, but drivers often do anyway if there aren’t physical barriers.

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Although a bit larger than its Mile Square City nickname would imply, Hoboken ranks fourth nationwide in population density, trailing three other New Jersey cities and two spots ahead of New York, according to 2022 census data.

This works.

Also,get rid of right turn slip lanes. (Pictured) 

They kill pedestrians.

This Is Not a Problem, It Is a Solution

This kills people and destroys the planetIt turns out that the trend towards oversized murder mobiles is happening in Europe as well.

There are now problems with the newer cars fitting in parking spaces, because cars,SUVs drive trend for new cars to grow 1cm wider every 2 years.

The article notes that parking spaces will need to be widened.

I have a better idea.  Make the parking spaces narrower by 1cm every 2 years, and ticket aggressively.

The SUV road maggots kill people and waste resources.  Do not accommodate their excesses:

New cars in the EU and UK have grown 1cm wider every two years, the Guardian can reveal, driven by large luxury SUVs whose sales show no sign of slowing.

“It’s unrelenting,” said James Nix, an analyst at the Transport and Environment (T&E) campaign group and author of the report. “Spurred on by sales of the largest SUVs, vehicles are getting wider every year.”

New cars have become so bloated that half of them are too wide to fit in parking spaces designed to the minimum on-street standards in many countries, the report found. The average width of a new car in the EU and UK passed 180cm in the first half of 2023, having grown an average of 0.5cm each year since 2001.

………

Big cars are more likely than small cars to kill people in crashes because they weigh more and have tall front ends that trap victims beneath them instead of knocking them to the side. They also pump more toxic gas into the air and eat up more space on roads and pavements.

You may not be able to ban these 4 ton death machines, but if they cannot fit in a parking space, people will not buy them.

Score One for Sortition

City officials in Santa Monica are recommended that a committee to recommend future options for their soon to be shuttered be randomly selected.

Basically, they think that the normal model, where the select the committee from applicants, it too likely to be full of people with an ax to grind, so they want to use sortition, where the members of the commission are randomly chosen, as they would be for a jury.

In this case, it's true.  The people who want to be on such a committee are largely realtors looking for free land for a quick buck:

The future of Santa Monica Airport should be hammered out -- not by the usual community activists and civic volunteers -- but by randomly selected "everyday people," City officials told the City Council Monday.

The information item from top Public Works officials proposes using a democratic lottery to "engage new residents through a randomized selection process," instead of relying on "the same self-selected individuals."

After meeting in person for six weekends over the course of some nine months starting next fall, the panel would make recommendations to the Council for the 227-acre site that under a 2017 agreement with the FAA would cease to operate as an airport at the end of 2028.

………

The lottery system -- which is not common in North America -- "would result in a panel that demands broad demographic representation, and minimizes the influence of special interests," said the report from Public Works Director Rick Valte.

Previous long-range planning efforts by the City have "suffered tremendous opposition from vocal community members whose resistance to key elements of each plan -- or even the entire plan itself -- resulted in protracted land use battles," the report said.

………

On the other hand, lottery-selected panelists "are everyday people" who "do not have prior experience with the policy topic" and "have a unique capacity for identifying common ground solutions in the public’s best interest.

"Much like a jury trial, they receive a vast amount of information before independently deliberating on recommendations," the report said.

Well, that's one way, and possibly the only way, to screen out the bad actors from the process.

Today in Urban Planning

Rookie. This one in Indonesia pic.twitter.com/oDzLjAmPtn

— RofX (@MVRRFX) January 5, 2023

It is an interestng concept.

Not a Surprise

In New York City, at least, removing cars from streets have had a beneficial effect on the restaurant business.

It turns out that the demands for more parking and better traffic flows don't provide the benefit that most businesses think that it does:

New York City’s Open Streets program grew out of a clamor for more outdoor space early in the coronavirus pandemic.

But the traffic-free zones also became a vital lifeline for struggling restaurants and bars that embraced curbside dining.

Now, the economic impact of the initiative is being measured for the first time in a new city report that finds that restaurants and bars on the most successful Open Streets reported stronger sales than those on similar commercial streets with car traffic — and in some cases, did better than they did before the pandemic.

………

Mr. Rodriguez is releasing the report on Tuesday as city officials seek to make outdoor dining permanent through an initiative known as Open Restaurants, which has enrolled more than 12,000 restaurants and bars. That initiative grew out of the Open Streets program, which was made permanent in 2021, though its efforts have been scaled back in some neighborhoods.

Critics of outdoor dining have complained that it has increased noise, trash and rats, as well as blocked sidewalks, taken away parking spots and worsened congestion, and they say it is no longer necessary as the city continues to recover from the pandemic.

………

The city report analyzed the total taxable revenue collected by restaurants and bars on five Open Streets in the neighborhoods of Astoria, Queens; Chinatown and Koreatown in Manhattan; and Park Slope and Prospect Heights in Brooklyn.

In 2021, the average total revenue for these five areas was nearly $6 million from June 1 through Aug. 31, or 19 percent higher than the average of $5 million for the three years preceding the pandemic, according to the report.

During the same time period in 2021, restaurants and bars on five commercial corridors near the Open Streets — which were not closed to traffic — struggled. The average total revenue on those streets was $3.6 million, a 29 percent drop from their $5.3 million prepandemic average.

The negative externalities of cars in cities are enormous, and to the degree that local governments attempt to foster development through making their cities "Car Friendly", they are engaged in a fools errand.

Evil Socialism

I'm actually serious here, and so is Joe Cortright at City Observatory, who notes that the United States embraces socialism in the form of parking for automobiles, and that this is a bad thing:

Florida Senator Marco Rubio has denounced President Biden’s $3.5 trillion spending program as un-American socialism.  Rubio claims:

In the end, Americans will reject socialism because it fundamentally runs counter to our way of life.

That’s not accurate, of course.  Socialism is well-established in the US, at least for car storage; something that is near and dear, certainly to Republicans.  You think otherwise?  Before you denounce socialism, Senator Rubio, consider this perspective.

Comrades, rejoice:  In the face of the counter-revolutionary neo-liberal onslaught, there’s at least one arena where the people’s inalienable rights reign supreme:  parking.

Fear not, comrade sister: you will not have to search for a parking space in our socialist utopia!

We may not be able to make health care a right or make housing a right, but the one place the revolution has plainly succeeded in usurping the market is in the case of parking.  Every worker’s council (though they may still brand themselves in the pre-revolutionary nomenclature of “city councils” or “townships” or “planning commissions”) has established the right of every citizen to abundant, free parking.

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Throughout the nation, workers councils city councils have decreed that the people’s right to parking is supreme. No bourgeois developer may build so much as a small shop or an apartment without adequately providing for the needs of the automobiles that may travel to or from these destinations. We may still struggle to require inclusionary zoning for people, but we have long since achieved inclusionary zoning for cars.

………

Take heart comrades: whatever our challenges in other domains, we can proudly tell the masses that we’ve succeeded in establishing a socialist utopia for car storage.  Forward!

I have increasingly come to believe that if you want a livable and walkable city, you need to fully price the cost of parking.

The US fetishization of parking is destroying our cities and our public life.

And Here We See the Apotheosis of My Prior Two Posts

In a story about a fight between the Mayor of Louisville, KY and the city council over the release of the Breonna Taylor records, we find that the botched police raid that led to Ms. Taylor's shooting was driven by a conscious policy of police harassment of minorities in an effort to "clean out" a neighborhood for redevelopment:

Breonna Taylor's shooting was the result of a Louisville police department operation to clear out a block in western Louisville that was part of a major gentrification makeover, according to attorneys representing the slain 26-year-old's family.

Lawyers for Taylor's family allege in court documents filed in Jefferson Circuit Court Sunday that a police squad — named Place-Based Investigations — had "deliberately misled" narcotics detectives to target a home on Elliott Avenue, leading them to believe they were after some of the city's largest violent crime and drug rings.

The complaint — which amends an earlier lawsuit filed by Taylor's mother against the three Louisville officers who fired their weapons into Taylor's home — claims Taylor was caught up in a case that was less about a drug house on Elliott Avenue and more about speeding up the city's multi-million dollar Vision Russell development plan.

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Accusations contained in lawsuits do not constitute evidence in a court of law and represent only one side of the argument.

………

"Breonna’s home should never have had police there in the first place," the attorneys wrote in the filing. "When the layers are peeled back, the origin of Breonna’s home being raided by police starts with a political need to clear out a street for a large real estate development project and finishes with a newly formed, rogue police unit violating all levels of policy, protocol and policing standards.

"Breonna’s death was the culmination of radical political and police conduct."

It appears that the Mayor and the police were a part of a conspiracy to drive out black residents to created a gentrified neighborhood.

I think that the technical term is "Ethnic Cleansing."

Good Riddance

Google's Sidewalk Labs has dropped its attempt to creating a privacy invading dystopian neighborhood along the Toronto shoreline.

Seriously, having Google running your life sounds even worse than George Orwell's worst nightmares:

When Google sibling Sidewalk Labs announced in 2017 a $50 million investment into a project to redevelop a portion of Toronto’s waterfront, it seemed almost too good to be true. Someday soon, Sidewalk Labs promised, Torontonians would live and work in a 12-acre former industrial site in skyscrapers made from timber—a cheaper and more sustainable building material. Streets paved with a new sort of light-up paver would let the development change its design in seconds, able to play host to families on foot and to self-driving cars. Trash would travel through underground chutes. Sidewalks would heat themselves. Forty percent of the thousands of planned apartments would be set aside for low- and middle-income families. And the Google sister company founded to digitize and techify urban planning would collect data on all of it, in a quest to perfect city living.

………

But Sidewalk Labs’ vision was in trouble long before the pandemic. Since its inception, the project had been criticized by progressive activists concerned about how the Alphabet company would collect and protect data, and who would own that data. Conservative Ontario premier Doug Ford, meanwhile, wondered whether taxpayers would get enough bang from the project’s bucks. New York-based Sidewalk Labs wrestled with its local partner, the waterfront redevelopment agency, over ownership of the project’s intellectual property and, most critically, its financing. At times, its operators seemed confounded by the vagaries of Toronto politics. The project had missed deadline after deadline.

The partnership took a bigger hit last summer, when Sidewalk Labs released a splashy and even more ambitious 1,524-page master plan for the lot that went well beyond what the government had anticipated, and for which the company pledged to spend up to $1.3 billion to complete. The redevelopment group wondered whether some of Sidewalk Labs’ proposals related to data collection and governance were even “in compliance with applicable laws.” It balked at a suggestion that the government commit millions to extend public transit into the area, a commitment, the group reminded the company, that it could not make on its own.

Seriously, giving your city to a profit driven ghoulish mega-corporation seems to be hihg on the list of really stupid ideas.

Good that it is over.

In the Annals of Stupidity

The idea that we should reconfigure cities to accommodate the limitations of robot cars is stupid.

It's History Schmistory stupid:

Special report Behind the mostly fake "battle" about driverless cars (conventional versus autonomous is the one that captures all the headlines), there are several much more important scraps. One is over the future of the city: will a city be built around machines or people? How much will pedestrians have to sacrifice for the driverless car to succeed?

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But the driverless car has to deal with pedestrians, as Christian Wolmar discussed at The Register last week: "The open spaces that cities like to encourage would end as the barricades go up. And foot movement would need to be enforced with Singapore-style authoritarianism."

………

"The randomness of the environment such as children or wildlife cannot be dealt with by today's technology," admits Volvo's director of autonomous driving, Markus Rothoff. The driverless car can't hear you scream. Tests are not being conducted in real pedestrian-congested conditions.

The cheat is: just get rid of the people around cars, so you don't need to solve these problems.

When people talk about the future of self-driving cars in the foreseeable future,  this is what they mean.

If this sounds far fetched, I will remind you that there is a recent historical precedent:  In the early 20^th century, they restructured the city, and criminalized what had been ordinary walking:  They called it "Jaywalking".

Do not underestimate the willingness of people who profit from driverless cars to restrict the rest of us, and to place the costs on society as a whole.

They have done it before.

NIMBY Bullsh%$

A law is working its way through the California that would required towns to allow higher density housing near to major mass transit projects.

The mayor of Berkeley is calling it, "A declaration of war against our neighborhoods."

No, it isn't. It's a common sense requirement to ensure that expensive mass transit projects benefit more than a few:

New proposed legislation, introduced by Sen. Scott Wiener and co-authored by Sen. Nancy Skinner, that would require California cities to allow denser, taller housing developments near transit hubs and bus lines, has ignited controversy in Berkeley and nationally.

With some limitations, SB 827 would eliminate restrictions on the number of houses that can be built within a half-mile of BART and within a quarter-mile of major bus routes, including Muni and AC Transit. It would also block cities from mandating parking requirements.

Skinner said the bill would help supply much-needed housing in Berkeley and the state.

“In the Bay Area alone, we’ve added thousands more jobs than we have housing units,” she said. “More housing is essential to reduce the pressure that lack of supply is causing in all our communities. And there’s no more logical place for housing than near transit.”

But the bill has drawn strong opposition from many who believe it would deprive cities of their rights to control their own zoning and could also lead to unwanted density. In fact Berkeley Mayor Jesse Arreguín characterizes the bill as “a declaration of war against our neighborhoods.”

Here is the deal, your honor: If you want transit in your neighborhoods, then your neighborhoods have to be transit friendly, and the first 3 requirements of transit friendly neighborhoods are density, density, and density.