Happy Tuesday everyone. We’ve got a short week, so let’s get right into it.
Here are the most notable stories that came across my desk in the past week…
School bollards: When PBOT gets serious about school streets (notice I said “when,” not “if”) I really hope they order a bunch of these pencil bollards to keep drivers away. (Detritus of Empire)
Shared streets law: Washington has passed a new “shared streets law” and I’m jealous. It allows cities to establish speed limits as low as 10 mph and removes the requirement for pedestrians to cross at crosswalks and corners. It unleashes the possibility for “woonerfs” statewide. We need this in Oregon! (The Urbanist)
It’s the bike share: A key to London’s massive growth in cycling rates is their Lime bike share system, which has 30,000 bikes and offers “zippy” e-bikes that offer an easy and convenient way for folks to get around. (The Economist) 🔒
Is this why they call it a HAWK signal? 🤣: A zoologist has document a hawk in New Jersey that uses a pedestrian-activated crosswalk signal as a hunting aid. (The Atlantic)
Bye bye flex posts: The City of Denver says plastic posts that protect bike lanes are too ugly and hard to maintain, so they’re replacing a bunch of them with rubberized curbs. (Westword)
Best kind of bus driver: Seattle bus operator Nathan Vass (who was keynote speaker at Oregon Walks fundraiser event two weekends ago, by the way) is all about community and has written a book about what he’s experienced driving routes many other drivers try to avoid. (KUOW)
Fatality trends not good: “Since an all-time reported low of 623 bicyclist deaths in 2010, we’ve seen an 87% increase in bicyclist deaths with consecutive all-time records for the most deaths in the last two years of available data.” (League of American Bicyclists)
Thanks to everyone who sent in links this week. The Monday Roundup is a community effort, so please feel free to send us any great stories you come across.
Thanks for reading.
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Fatality Trends: Death rates started to go way up in 2010/11. Up until then my flip phone and Blackberry basically only made calls and some basic text, then features got added and phones started expanding in size and complexity very rapidly. But we aren’t distracted, are we? Oh no… it’s clearly some plot involving speed, the auto industrial complex, certain politicians, etc., because clearly from the LAB the trend really started not in 2010 when Obama was president but much later the other Obama guy got re-elected in 2012, or was it in 2014? Let me check online… Mr. T didn’t start his first term until 2017, 7 years into the death spiral, so it couldn’t be him…Gosh, I’m so confused!
I have come to the conclusion that phones are the reason for the increase in crashes. I don’t know the solution, besides getting people out from behind the wheel.
A set of very powerful sequenced EMP’s to annihilate all smart phones and the infrastructure that enables them?
A fundamental shift in physics such that electronics and ICE’s don’t work?
A computer virus that starts killing anyone wearing airpods via their phone?
A zombie apocalypse – the zombies end up eating anyone who doesn’t pay attention!
An alien apocalypse! Anyone using a phone will get a hyper velocity spike on their location!
An AI apocalypse – hunter killer robots home in on phone signals and kill any human stupid enough to use one.
Even if using a phone became a death sentence I’d wager a significant portion of the human race would *still* not be able to put them down.
Do you remember the Jessica Alba Dark Angel show? Where after an EMP blast Seattle reverted to people power and the heroine and her friends worked at a bike delivery service. I think that was before smartphones, but what an intriguing idea. At least it showed off the benefits of bikes in a good way.
The list was inspired by:
Dark Angel
S.M. Stirling
Dr. Who
The last 3 don’t have any specific genesis – just way too many SF movies and books over my life 🙂
Either spend billions on self driving (still some time yet) or disable the phones cell signal over 15mph (they could do this overnight if they wanted to). I understand the passenger’s connectivity would be sacrificed, but I imagine the social benefits would be worth it.
This one law Garmin and TomTom want you to support!
That’s not really our choice, of course, but disabling phones traveling over 15mph, while (probably) technically feasible, may have other negative consequences, and would, at best, reduce us to 2011 levels of carnage. Self-driving could push the rate far lower than that (like the 85-96% reduction in crashes involving cyclists and pedestrians reported a couple of weeks ago).
The thing about phones while driving that’s really frustrating is that there isn’t a clear mechanism for accountability. If someone is driving drunk, they have alcohol in their system that can be tested for via breathalyzer or blood test. If someone is speeding or driving recklessly, they can be caught via speed camera, cop with radar, or as a result of the crash investigation using skid marks and the direction/distance traveled of the vehicle post-collision.
Playing on the phone while driving has just enough plausible deniability to make enforcing the rule difficult. Back in the day you could look at call/text logs but now phones are constantly sending & receiving data whether or not you’re using them. No, officer, that wasn’t my phone in my had, it was a granola bar. Or, my personal favorite after I called someone out who almost hit me while staring at their phone “I was just looking up directions.” It also doesn’t help that I see a lot of police using their phones while driving : /
I think harsher penalties and stepping up enforcement couldn’t hurt. Even busting people scrolling at stoplights would help disincentivize playing on the phone while driving. I rarely ever see drivers on their phones when they have passengers, so there is a social expectation that drivers not be distracted. Maybe shaming drivers on their phone could be a motivator for cultural change? I could also see why someone wouldn’t want to or wouldn’t feel safe doing that though.
I see drivers on their phones even with passengers in the car often enough to…drive me crazy.
Actually, there is. I’ve been regularly hearing of cases in the US where police scan the last half hour of every person involved in a crash – the phone companies have no issues these days, privacy or otherwise, about giving the police everything they want – and various drivers then get charged with being distracted while driving. For a more prominent case but overseas, the recent case of the tree next to Hadrian’s Wall getting cut down, the culprits were caught by a phone-useage scanner police had earlier installed near the highway, mostly to catch speeders – they boasted about their exploits while driving.
I think technology may fix that. As cars evolve with their own screens, more drivers will become distracted by their cars’ screens rather than their phones.
That’s just silly; drivers will still be distracted. We’d probably need to make the whole windshield a screen to keep drivers from being distracted by their cars’ screens.
Have other countries seen similar trends since the introduction of cell phones?
Many countries in the EU have seen flat or decreasing numbers over the same period:
https://www.cyclinginjurylegal.co.uk/uk-cycling-accident-injury-statistics
My theory is that vehicle sizes in the US, combined with little to no attempts to improve infrastructure in the US, combined with an increase in cell phone use have lead us here. It is not the phones alone.
You forgot the most important . . . enforcement of the laws about distracted driving.
2024 saw people driver 3.279 *TRILLION* miles in the US, up more than 32 billion over 2023. This took place over 4.1 million miles of roadway.
There are approx. 900,000 sworn officers in the US, with about 2/3rds assigned to patrol duty (not traffic specifically). Studies indicate that 2/3rds of their time is spent actively on patrol (not at a desk), and about 45% of it “attached” to calls (therefore, not on the streets watching for traffic violations). That leaves just over 1/5th of their hours available for actually roaming around.
If the rest of their patrol hours were spent checking for distracted drivers then they would be able to spend 260m hours a year, or about 65hours per mile of roadway.
The reality is that, even on heavily trafficked streets in urban areas, the chances of dangerous driving even happening in the vicinity of a police officer are negligible. This drops to about zero on rural roads.
Even in the absence of willful abrogation of their sworn duty the vast majority of offenses go unpunished. (I console myself with Dante’s 9th circle – specifically reserved for those who are forswron on their oaths).
People speed, drive drunk, drive while looking at the phone and more because they believe (with some basis in fact) that they will not be caught.
COTW
Related, a much, much larger percentage of vehicles driven in Europe are manual, e.g. stickshift that generally keep your non steering hand occupied while driving which may also contribute to less phone use while driving over there.
Phones coupled with the steadily increasing acceleration/speed and size/weight of cars are the only reasonable explanations I can think of. I’m open to other ideas, but I don’t have any at the moment.
Shared Streets: When I worked at PBOT we formalized “Pedestrian Shared Streets” as part of the Pedestrian Design Guide, with a volume limit of 500 vehicles per day and speed limit of 15 mph. These criteria are built on ORS 811.105, setting a statutory speed limit of 15 mph on “Narrow residential roadways” as defined by ORS 801.368.
I wondered if PBOT could go a step further, and use ORS 810.180 to lower the speed limit 5 mph more, bringing the final speed of these shared streets down to 10 mph.
Your comment’s timing is perfect for me, as I’m trying to get PBOT to do some things to improve safety on an already-designated shared street near me. I recall some discussion in past articles here (by a lawyer/contributor) about the possibility of creating 10 mph speed limits in Portland.
My feeling based on what I’ve heard so far from PBOT is that their engineers (at least the ones I heard from) have a poor awareness or appreciation of the shared street tools that others at PBOT have been (admirably) developing.
Aren’t such limits already in place inside some city parks?