Mass Transit is the Answer

The future of our cities and earth depend on a lasting reduction of the personal automobile.

How is this best achieved?

Nope bike won't do it on their own, though they are certainly a huge part of the solution for younger and healthier people.

Effective, comfortable and safe Mass Transit.

The goal within a ten mile radius of any viable population center is this:

One should be able to walk no more than five minutes to and from a transit node.

The commuter should arrive at any destination within 15-30 minutes

The commuter should be able to carry and secure 10-20 pounds of belongings. (Tough one I know.)

The financing of this, simply put would be transferred from the billions currently wasted on propping up needless freeway systems.

Opportunity Corridor Alternative

Cleveland has been trying to get I-490 through the Heights somehow for 60 years. Right now it ends in an ugly and abused stub at E 55th Street.

Now the idea is to get it to University Circle with its powerful medical residents, (like that?) the Cleveland Clinic and University Hospital.

The State of Ohio and City favor a destructive and expensive plan to displace (mostly poor) residents from an area, (that actually could be a Mass Transit Paradise,) with a freeway termed the "Opportunity Corridor."

This is not an opportunity for the residents of the neighborhood.  The primary reason is to get suburbanites quickly through a part of the city they abhor.

Opposition to the project is found here:

http://opportunitycorridor.com/

Following the idea of the Woodland Ave Alternative I made a map of my specific ideas by which existing roads and freeways could be re-built intelligently and cost effectively, affording a true opportunity for all people involved.

MVH Opportunity Corridor Alternative Map

Oh yeah.

This is the ODOT page:

ODOT Opportunity Corridor

Bike Lanes Are Capitulation

I often post this on bike lane discussions.

Bike lanes are the dominant subject among bicyclists at the moment, though many of the more experienced tacitly acknowledge their imperfect, incomplete and possibly misleading implication of safety.

Regardless, the strategy is to get more bikes on the road by whatever means necessary. Many new cyclists, trained in automobile lane culture, need to feel that there is a space reserved for them.

Not only do I believe the implied safety of a bike lane is greatly, and perhaps dangerously overstated, I don't believe the nascent strategy is taking much hold. I've witnessed that "women with kids" and "older people" simply will not ride bicycles unless they "feel as if they are riding on the sidewalk," which of course many of them do anyhow. Most new cyclists are younger and less in need of such misleading assurances. Bike lanes at intersections are especially dangerous.

There are the gold, (green) standard bike lanes; painted bright green and 4 feet in width along slow speed ROW's. There are also completely parallel segregated facilities in nations such as The Netherlands, all requiring additional and/or specific maintenance and funding, and of course, dedicated bicycle trails. These require even more maintenance and funding, and are often shared with hikers or families and strollers through parkland.

In the U.S., we have the advantage of typically and sufficiently wide public right-of-ways already available. Of course our history in the last 100 years has been to give every inch of that space to automobile culture.

That space isn't being taken away from automobile culture in the application of bike lane philosophy as it should be, the more usual application is to either lessen the width of, (but retain in number) existing automobile lanes AND retain on-street automobile curb parking.
Even more 'safe' in this way of thinking is to add surface to the right of existing automobile space, with or without an added median, necessarily encroaching on what little space there may have been for pedestrian access originally.

Capitulation.

The true solution is a two-part strategy:

Reduce four, (or six) bi-directional lanes for automobiles to two, (or five) including a center left-turn lane. There's your cycling space.

More importantly, slow that automobile traffic the fuck down. 20-25 MPH is the target.

These should be the goals of the cycling movement.