Site icon BikePortland

Drunk walking, calories, and funding: A few tidbits from TRB Annual Meeting

Buffered Bike Lane with a bike symbol and arrow pointing forward


In case you haven’t heard, the Transportation Research Board’s 91st Annual Meeting is being held right now in Washington D.C. It’s a major event in the transportation world that attracts the best and brightest thinkers and policymakers from around the country.

I’ve been following updates from the event via Twitter and two quotes have been shared hundreds of times. Here’s the first one:

On 350 calories, a bicyclist can go 10 miles, a pedestrian 3.5 miles, and a car 100 feet.

That was tweeted by @AurashKhawarzad and I’m not sure who the original source was. I’m also not sure how you convert car movement into calories, but it’s a fun way to look at the numbers.

And then there’s this quote (paraphrased by tweeters) from famed transportation researcher Todd Litman:

“Best urban sustainability measure: “whether or not you are able to walk home from a bar drunk.””

One more quick note about TRB. With the transportation funding debate heating up, a Streetsblog DC reporter attended a session on the topic. Check out what he found out in this story, Is Doing Nothing a Politically Acceptable Way to Pay For Transportation?

Switch to Desktop View with Comments