A busy week.

     Been a bit busy of late.  Working on lots of projects most of which should improve the local transportation scene on one level or another.  Here is a short list of some of the things accomplished in the last week or so.

     Crafted letter to mayor Ralph Becker urging him to consider another way to increase the efficiency of the local transportation network.

     Attended Bike Symposium held by Salt Lake City Parks and Recreation.  The purpose of this was to gather input into the future of gravity mountain biking within the city.  Specifically looking at what to do about I-Street as well as seek opinion regarding potential sites for a new gravity oriented bike facility.

     Crafted letter to Salt Lake City Parks regarding the above topic...specifically giving input into the site selection for the new bike facility as well as restating the importance of preserving I-Street.

     Attended the second NICA High School mountain bike race in Sherwood Hills supporting the East High Team.

     Attended a trail build think tank regarding the reconstruction of the Maple Hollow DH trail in Draper, Utah.

     Attended and officiated the first ever Park City Dual Slalom event held on the First Time Run at PCMR.

     Test road the new flow trails built by Alpine Trails in North Salt Lake.  The trail head for these is at Wild Rose Park.  Check them out.

     Crafted two letters seeking sponsorship for Galen for the 2013 race season.

     Did a little research into the segregation of autos and bikes with respect to roundabouts or traffic circles.  There are some interesting and expensive solutions being installed in Europe.  I have included pictures of two of them below.
 

       Notice in the first picture the traffic is stopped.  Ironically there was a traffic circle initially at this site and it was removed when the overhead circle was installed.  A mistake in my opinion.  The design has some merit however.  The cycle/pedestrian ring is almost level and the intersection for gas power vehicles is recessed into the ground.  Nice solution!!!!!  The second installation has long entrance ramps which reduce the grade but are more expensive and require a more difficult entrance.  Both of these are great examples of how to keep traffic moving with large volumes of bikes and pedestrians crossing the flow.

Where are we heading????????

 


The question is, what do we want our transportation future to look like?  How do we want to pursue opportunities?  The purpose here is to identify a few of the opportunities before us and show how the smallest in paradigm shifts can bring about large changes in the way we design our transportation system.


While our communications networks innovate at the speed of light our transportation networks languish in medieval models.  Our governments continue to prop up the past, supporting old paradigms in the name of progress.

Don't get me wrong, there certainly is a business model for the train industry. Its just the idea of supporting it with tax dollars while locking out highly innovative transportation schemes seems like a plan bent on destruction.  Adding more lanes to the freeway?  We all know how well that works.  For every new lane, capacity for that lane is incrementily smaller than the lane coming before it. 

After all, it is well recognized the concept of individualized transport (in this case walking, biking, or the personal automobile) is not going away.   So why are we trying to force square pegs into round holes?  Why do we spend such a large percentage of our transportation resources on quixotic concepts giving ever smaller returns on investment?  To answer that is to delve into an area of the human psyche outside the scope of this blog.

Our transportation network should be evolving along a curve similar to the communications industry.  The average speed of the network should be increasing.  It doesn't seem to be heading that way from my perspective.  It is estimated that 700,000 years (yes those are human years not dog years) are lost because of surface transportation congestion every year.  Lost productivity as a result of traffic congestion in the U.S. is estimated at 2.2% of GNP.  Is this a future we want for us or our kids?

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