The Monday Roundup: Houston has a problem, old maps, scooter laws, and more

I think it’s important to distinguish between scooters which are human powered and e-scooters just as it is important to distinguish between bicycles which are human powered and e-bikes, most of which assist human power. All of the links which refer to “scooters” are actually about e-scooters.

“after he killed someone with his car is finally going to prison for over a year. But guess what? He’ll still get his license back and could drive again.”

but i saw a biker run a stop sign!!!!1!!

Oh man. Thanks to you & Richard Masoner for the USGS historical topography map. That’s too cool.

The hullabaloo over scooter injuries is reminiscent of the helmet nannies who have made everyone believe that cycling is too dangerous to partake in. Looking at the injury numbers from San Diego, I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Daily in America, 10,000 people are injured and another 110 are killed by cars. The San Diego hospital reported 0.5 scooter injuries per day in what was likely a big injury week. That would represent the car-caused daily injury rate for a population of 17,000 typical Americans. I get that a lower population is riding scooters than is getting into cars, but how much lower is it? If 10% of the population is hopping onto scooters, they’re looking safer than cars, at least in San Diego. If it’s only 1%, then cars win for safety if those injuries are of comparable severity (but they’re not).

I will never understand how Americans can all have friends and family who have been seriously injured and killed in/by cars and yet they remain convinced beyond all reason and argument that cars are perfectly safe and all alternatives are “obviously” dangerous. We even have scare campaigns about riding buses (among all those dangerous people who dress differently than we do, don’t you know).

helmet giveaways are an, “act of surrender.”

i agree with this but would go further:

* helmet requirements are an “act of surrender”.
* arguing that bike helmets are important for traffic safety is an “act of surrender”.
* criticizing or judging people who choose not to wear helmets is an “act of surrender”.

note: i have absolutely no problem with people who *choose* to wear helmets. i strongly support personal choice when it comes to helmets.

I explain the helmet law to my kids as being motivated more by a desire to prevent loitering than to enhance safety. When I was a kid we all sat around in our friend’s driveways or the street on our bikes all day. Occasionally we’d do some riding, but it was a lot of just hanging out. No one would ever do that with a helmet on. So they effectively criminalized the way I played as a child…

Geeze another cycling story with Peter Sagan’s smug mug.

Seems like the biggest effect of making helmets mandatory for scooters is to give people a quick way to judge scooter riders, so they can instantly label them criminals, which allows them to go straight to the conclusion that if they show no respect for the helmet law, they’ll also show no respect for any other laws or for anyone else’s safety.

With its proposed 2040 Plan, Minneapolis is putting together a great strategy for reducing carbon emissions and car dependence. Since we already have great bike facilities and transit, the next step is getting amenities built closer to people’s homes, and that means having enough density of housing to support that. As has been written about here before, under the Plan multi-unit development could again happen on arterials where apartments currently exist but aren’t allowed under today’s zoning (the exact same problem Portland has).

But the more significant change would be the rezoning of the entire city – every single acre – to allow up to fourplexes. In a city where the majority of the population does not live in single family homes but the majority of the land is currently zoned for single-family homes, not one block would be zoned SFH-only anymore. That would probably cause fewer negative impacts to existing homeowners (whatever those might be) than the construction of large apartment buildings, but could do even more to alleviate the housing crisis. It’s a brilliant and revolutionary change, IMO.

Reporting here from the front lines, I can tell you that the NIMBY opposition has rallied fiercely, as it has against efforts in other cities (notably Portland and Seattle, since I’m familiar with them) to create enough housing. Starting a couple months ago, bright red “Don’t bulldoze our neighborhoods! Stop the 2040 Plan! Developers win – neighborhoods lose!” have sprouted like May dandelions on lawns all over my part of town. Right now they significantly outnumber the blue and purple “End the Shortage – More Homes Now – Minneapolis 2040” signs like the one on my own lawn.

Not that lawn signs in the posh parts of town are indicative of public opinion as a whole, but the 2040 Plan as currently conceived may be shaping up as a difficult battle. The opposition consistently raises the specter of quaint homes on side streets being leveled, with the remaining quaint homes towered over “Up”-style by high-rise apartment buildings – which is very far from what the plan actually calls for. Of course the irony of all of this is most of the bulldozing of existing homes is for single-family rebuilds, to house the same people that oppose duplexes and fourplexes. But that is what you can expect from a group disingenuously named “Minneapolis for Everyone”. At least the pro-urbanist group, “Neighbors for More Neighbors,” calls itself what it actually is.

In last November’s election we threw out most of the entrenched city council in favor of a strongly progressive, pro-urbanist slate. Red-sign opposition notwithstanding, we’re on track to get what we voted for.