Wednesday Afternoon Commute - Holy Moses

Another day, another morning links post abandoned on the home computer. But there is another blog post at my other blog. 

• Sign up for Car Free Day and you could win an iPad. 
• Glen Echo, MD wants to install the state's first stop sign camera (and the first outside of California?) According to study of the intersection “Approximately 81% of all vehicles, ran the stop sign,” and 65% of all vehicles did so with a police officer present. So by the 85th percentile rule, it should be legal. There's more a the Examiner, which leads me to wonder how you get less than four wheels to stop?
• Biking from Ocean City to Assateague"The ride can be frustrating at first — the designated bike lines occasionally jump from one side of the road to the other, change into vehicular turn lanes or disappear altogether, and the road sees a good amount of trucks and other heavy traffic whizzing by at 50 mph — but traffic thins closer to the park."
• Three New York City council members want to double the width of the Brooklyn Bridge path. They want to designate three-quarters of the widened lane to pedestrians and the rest to cyclists (which doesn't match the ratio of 4000 pedestrian users to 3100 cyclists, but may if you go by time on the span. And it may not even matter.). When will they learn that you can't end congestion by adding lanes? Update: More here. 
• "Few people think of Moses as a cycling advocate, what with his infamous—and unpardonable—refusal to include bike lanes on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (ostensibly for fear of suicides). But earlier in his career, Moses was a keen advocate of bicycling and built New York City's first true bicycle infrastructure. The Depression had set off a bicycle sales boom in the city, as people could no longer afford cars. In 1938, to accommodate all the new bicyclists, Moses announced a vast system of bike paths—"fifty miles of paved parkland roads exclusively for bicycle riders," gushed the New York Times, that would enable bike enthusiasts to "pedal from one end of the city to the other.""

Comments

[MM]

Seems like cheating to make car-free day on a Saturday. Wasn't it during the week last year, like a Thursday or something? Kinda more meaningful if you get people to pledge to go car-free on one of the 5 days a week they are most likely to drive.

[oboe]

From the Examiner comments:

When there is 80% non-compliance, then the problem is with the design of the intersection and not the drivers or enforcement. For the same reason, traffic engineers recommend that speed limits be set at the 85 percentile (the speed at which 85% of drivers drive at or below).

And yet, the fact that pedestrians have to jaywalk and cyclists jaybike is indicative of nothing other than their innate lawlessness...

Odd how that works.

[IMGoph]

Brooklynn, eh? That a girl's name or something? ;)