Part 3 & more in the mix

In the second part, I spoke (no bike pun intended, actually, but I like it!) of the alleged solution to all problems: more money. Although, Wes Marshall suggests that given more financial resources, traffic engineers would play their same-old-tune of making roads bigger and more deadly. He does, however, hint at a more effective use for those funds.

One tenet of Killed by a Traffic Engineer is that pedestrians and people on bicycles will often learn to avoid dangerous sections of road infrastructure if at all possible, so when an engineers arrive at those sites to perform usage counts, there are few or no vulnerable users. This avoidance is interpreted as a lack of demand, and the location isn't improved. Marshall points out that any time the designs of these spots become more inclusive anyway, pedestrian and bicycle usage jumps!

Bicycles and baseball both bear "B".

People on bikes and pedestrians tend to be more local, so they figure out what works, what is safe. Those that don't, they don't necessarily survive to be recorded by usage studies. So, yes, used well, a big caveat, more money could help. One idea for its use I was excited to see in the book, because I'd thought of it myself a few years earlier and was happy to learn I wasn't uniquely ingenious, was painting the crosswalk zebra stripes atop speed humps. This would force drivers to slow to a speed they could more reasonably stop should someone attempt to use the crosswalk. Yay, that has been done in places, and the data say it works!

Then, to confuse my thinking more, during my Monday ride home on the Norwattuck Trail, I stopped at the Hadley Library for a book by Fiona Hill and a French film. The librarians in Hadley have organized their catalog and collection in a way, or two, that encourages random browsing. In the past, I learned that any video that is part of the Criterion Collection is in a separate location, despite no mention of this, nor the fact that it is a Criterion film, in the call number. So, when the catalog listed the francophone movie I wanted as "foreign", I looked for that section, which doesn't exist. Instead, I found the documentaries, and a title caught my eye. I watched it yesterday morning. Yes, there are more parts to come.

Despite the title,

 it closed with a more amicable statement:

"This is not a war. It's a city."