The Monday Roundup: End traffic stops, racist urban planning, free bike share, and more

It’s the second dumbest idea. Putting rice in burritos is #1.

As a cyclist, parent, and community member, I hope for better traffic safety. Are police with guns part of that? Maybe? Seems like there are just better, safer options.

Like the article pointed out, a nice first step here might be making traffic-stop data publicly available to help make better decisions.

The chances of anyone being stopped for either speeding or driving drunk in most of the USA is already nearly zero and has been for quite some time (long before Covid-19 anyway) – and most drivers are quite aware of that. On the other hand, the chances of being pulled over for driving while black are pretty high, apparently.

Did you read the article before commenting, because your concerns are addressed in the, ya know, article.

Yeah, I understand the enormous epidemic of inappropriate traffic stops, but I have a hard time processing the idea of getting rid of traffic enforcement altogether. Arguably, since cars kill more people than criminals, that should be the one kind of police activity that might justify itself. Shouldn’t police be stopping someone who’s blasting down Hawthorne at 50? Or an obvious drunk driver weaving across multiple lanes on Chavez?

Claiming, as in this article, that traffic enforcement doesn’t work because people still drive irresponsibly a lot of the time, is a little like saying I should stop cleaning my house because I can’t keep it perfectly clean 100% of the time. Obviously, cleaning doesn’t work!

I do get the point. We need to figure out how to make traffic stops more fair, and eliminate pretext stops completely. Not to mention stop the harassment of low-speed, low-mass cyclists committing minor infractions. Drop the war on drugs too, which fuels a lot of that activity. Only big violations should provoke a stop. I get that. But sometimes the solution to a problem is not to go to the opposite extreme.

We don’t need an armed police officer to write traffic tickets though. Even if we don’t move more to speed cameras, we could save substantial money by having someone other than a sworn, armed officer enforcing traffic regulations.

If a blog posts clickbait, then that is reposted as clickbait in another blog, does it still make it clickbait?

I am so tired of this “lost control of the vehicle” canard as an excuse for vehicular mayhem. Unless the steering system broke, a vehicle careening in to someones driveway at speed is always caused by some action taken by the driver. They could have been driving too fast for conditions, distracted by a phone, driving recklessly etc. This is an “out” we give to operating a motor vehicle that we give to almost no other dangerous activity. Imagine, “Bob was practicing with his sword in the back yard and he lost control of it and it cut off the neighbors head.”

I think one of the points of the Abolition movement is to drive home that for certain communities, policing as it is currently conducted already seems to be of little if any value. A lot of people in minority communities certainly feel that way, with justification. To all the worriers who ask, “but if we ‘abolish’ the police, who do you call if someone is breaking into your house?” Well, for a lot of people there already is no one to call. I once lived in a minority-majority neighborhood in Seattle where the police never responded to 911 calls when gunfire was reported. Of course they would still pull over Black drivers with taillights out. It did make me wonder what good were the police there?

To a lesser but still-real degree, cyclists also have to wonder how much value we get from policing, given the mayhem motorists are able to get away with against us, with impunity, over and over again.

David, it is unfair to compare the 1990s Portland bike share to almost any current bike share service in the US, especially Biketown. I used the Yellow Bike service and it was a ‘hippy’ mess of a “product” (though the volunteers and their hearts were in the right place…vs the lack of City support)… if you were not around then, the tires were stuffed with compressor hoses etc. and the bikes were a hodgepodge of equipment that were left over from the 1970s bike boom. My memory, most Yellow bikes did not stay ridable for more than a day or two once released into the wild, if you could find one…thus a low value service.

You are correct – that how locals “value” a service will reflect on how they they use or abuse a product…if left unenforced. I would hope most Portlanders would positively support a ‘free bike share system’ especially one they registered for…like a library card. Tourists or regional residents (like those ‘Evil Vancouverians’ – like me) would still have to pay for such a service.

Certainly my spouse…invariably bought the more expensive item because it surely must have been worth it simply because the price was higher.

We have a Bike Tax; why not tax all sales? /s

Anything that can be done in a autos computer system can be undone. Technology changes will never be 100% and take a long time to be mandated. Example, mandated backup cameras in vehicles were first proposed in 2008, it wasn’t until 2019 when all new vehicles sold included them. Since the average car is 12 years old the % of cars with them is still low.

A few months before Covid-19 hit us, I heard an excellent lecture from a health official from the CDC concerning transit, walking, bicycling, and driving, at a bike/walk convention in NC. He pointed out to us that the CDC headquarters itself, built during the Clinton era, was located in a very suburban office area in the Atlanta metro that was effectively only safely accessible by driving. Yes, there are some nearby sidewalks and some transit service, but connections were poor, sidewalks were non-continuous and walkers required to pass through parking lots to get to office doors, and the bike lanes were the narrow painted sort on roadways were cars frequently went well over the 45 mph speed limit. In short, the CDC itself has a car-only bias on health issues, according to the embarrassed senior official who worked there. So when I see CDC advice on transit use, I take it with a grain of salt.

I blame Bill Clinton.

Meanwhile, our latest cluster outbreak (over 100 people) is in Union County, OR, population 26,000. Most outbreaks have been in food packing plants. I imagine it would be hard to contact trace and prove that transmission occurred on public transit, but the fact that we see so many large cities in the world with incredibly busy public transit systems that have little to no cases would seem to indicate that public transit CAN be safe.

Reading the tea leaves here, it sounds like we need to:
1. Eliminate traffic enforcement
2. Round up a posse to enforce neighborhood speed limits

It’s NOT an obsolete concern! You don’t have to go north of the Columbia to be walking or cycling in an area whose local gov’t cares nothing for your life if you’re not in a car.

I looked up the location where the two teens (really children–ages 13 and 15)were arrested. and one basically beaten–“in the area of N. Osage Dr. and Newton St. in Tulsa” from this article: https://www.gayly.com/oklahoma-naacp-calls-charges-tulsa-african-american-teen-be-dropped

You can see sidewalks are intermittent at best: https://www.google.com/maps/@36.1727063,-96.0019928,3a,60y,17.81h,78.71t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1saV2YOR-PmubQSYFiEQLV0Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

The main focus of all the press is correctly on the police mistreatment of the two boys. The targeting of people for walking in the street when there’s no decent alternative is a secondary issue, but still really bad itself.