The Monday Roundup: Paris’s car-free day, SF’s chop shop ban and more

Suffice to say I’m ambivalent about “more trouble than it’s worth” from an intellectually uncurious White House.

Privately operated highways are one of the most persistent Objectivist fantasies. This administration was their chance, but for a change, somebody decided to “research” the idea before charging ahead, but couldn’t support it even working back from the conclusion.

At long last, this idea could have spontaneously combusted in the light of day. For now, it’s just a bad idea safely sheltered in the basements and locked bedrooms of impressionable boys who just picked up a copy of Atlas Shrugged. And it will be back.

I think Portland should also ban bike chop shops on public property. The arguments for this are pretty obvious to anyone who’s had their bike stolen or found bike paths and sidewalks blocked by piles of dismantled bikes being stored and sold and traded for drugs.

I’ve known a few people who have had their licenses taken away from them. It’s a complicated issue, but one theme I have heard is that some people just do dumb things even if another theme I’ve heard is that the system is exploitative. For example, they get busted drunk driving, get their license suspended, don’t even try to figure out anything else when there are options, and set themselves on a course where they lose their jobs and get into recurring legal trouble.

One thing to keep in mind is that regardless of how the person loses his license, the problem described in the article always exists.

Most people lose their licenses for good reasons, and those that get them back are bad insurance risks — I know a 50 y.o. who pays $4K/yr liability insurance on a 4 cylinder junker that’s barely worth 1/3 that. He’s never been in an crash, but he did get his license suspended for a year. Presumably, that number would be higher if there would have been a payout.

BTW, e-bikes are a great option for some who lose their cars. I’ve encountered more than one “court appointed cyclist” who went that route. If you get an overpowered one (e-bike laws aren’t exactly an enforcement priority), you can move pretty far at speeds that approach a car without need for a valid license or insurance.

We need a bike chop shop ban in Portland NOW. Time to stop looking the other way.

“Maybe that’s why three in four Americans with suspended licenses choose to keep driving”

Sorry, I know it’s difficult to be poor, and I know minority groups disproportionately accumulate tickets because of biased policing and sometimes lose their licenses, but I run out of sympathy on this one.

In my experience most people who’ve lost their licenses are bad drivers who shouldn’t be behind the wheel. We allow far too many people to drive as it is. I have witnessed quite a few collisions over the years. And in nearly every one (including one where I was rear-ended), the apparent at-fault driver lacked a license.

Best bad-driver quote of all time … an unlicensed driver who ran a YIELD sign and hit another car actually said this to me: “But yield doesn’t mean stop!”

Yes, I’m sorry it can be hard without a car (or even with one) to juggle multiple part-time jobs, kids, and everything else you need to do to make ends meet. But if you can’t do it safely, too bad. Driving is not a right, and if you’re bad at it you have no place getting behind the controls of a deadly weapon and pointing it at people.

Three cheers for the Delaware Stop!

The huge parking lot at the school in Atlanta just shows how we refuse to ever back down on car subsidies. If the staff had to pay market rates for the land that is being wasted and pay for extra PE for the kids since all those car amenities make them less able to walk and ride to school, they would beg for the lot to not be built. The district and city have policies, toothless, to encourage active transportation. The school is near a transit hub with high density residences and still the school district admins see fit to waste expensive real estate to subsidize staff parking.

I’m sickened, doubly so because it sounds so much like Eugene’s recent work. To add insult to injury, the Safe Routes to School person in Eugene was just given a lifetime achievement award by the Street Trust. After about a decade on the job, this very nice man has achieved negative growth in terms of getting kids to ride bikes to school. In fact, the loss of riders at the local schools has played a noticeable role in Eugene’s 43% decline in bike ridership.

Oh, but just like Decatur, Georgia we have policies to encourage active transportation, as long as it doesn’t interfere with subsidizing and using sedentary transportation. Ugh! How do we get back to the proper side of the looking glass?

If Cary Moon is elected mayor of Seattle, we should all be jealous. Car-free since ’94? I don’t think any other mayors on the west coast have ever gone a week without driving a car.

I love the notion of changing the signal timing to put pedestrians and cyclists ahead of motorists on busy streets. That’s one of the things that holds back cycling in cities that are car-centric: you can do diversions (not enough yet by a long shot), but in the end they force you to cross many arterials that involve long waits for lines of cars. There’s a world of difference between a twenty-second delay and a ninety second wait, especially if the twenty-second delay results in a green phase long enough to occasionally make the light without waiting at all (you know, like motorists get most of the time).

I ride Springwater from 122 to Sellwood 3-4x a week. You can’t make that ride w/o seeing piles of bike frames/wheels stacked up in front of tents. Usually one of the “campers” is out deconstructing more. Very often there is another resident riding with one hand and guiding his latest acquisition with the other.

I want to have sympathy for their plight, but they sure make that difficult with their actions.
I also want a Police force that cares and enforces. Guess those desires ain’t gonna happen ???