Category: traffic

Verdant

Sealed highway
Biked in the rain four hours today. It was transfixingly beautiful, mountains, mist, lakes. We survived the cars and trucks tearing by. A venture in faith? Taking a stupid chance? P-doom definitely higher than normal.
2 lane farm road
I’d thought all the roads would look like this.

broadjump

A car jumped over the CSX-Buckingham Branch tracks the morning of June 5, a highly unusual occurrence. On a typical day thousands of vehicles go under the tracks via Franklin Street between Carlton Avenue and Market Street, no one goes over.
Sources speculate the vehicle was traveling at a high rate of speed north on Franklin. At an estimated 80 mph the car blew through the stop sign , mowed through vegetation, went up the 45% incline, jumped the railroad tracks and was stopped suddenly on the north side of the embankment by a 12″ diameter tree.
Nigel Wood Tree Service loaned 4×8 poly-carbonate sheets to the homeowner enabling Charlottesville Wrecker’s recovery of the vehicle without damage to the turf.
2012 Buick Regal
Air bags protect the passengers, trees protect the house. No word on the current condition of the vehicle’s occupants.

Kitatama Elementary School

Kitatama ES
Neighborhood school across the street and up the hill. Looks like a school, not a factory. Gardens on the school grounds, different than the US model (big parking lot and few windows)
brooms
Notable degree of cleanliness prevails. Possibly that training starts early? A commonly held societal value?
residential streets
The hillside neighborhood is an oasis of quiet. The neighborhood streets are typically 12-14′ wide. “Fire codes” wouldn’t allow this street typology in the US.
Walking to school starts early.
The practice of walking to school is nearly universal and starts early.
Car use around the school is restrict. The community assures that children walk, and that while walking they are safe.
Car use around the school is restricted. The community assures that children walk, and that while walking they are safe.

East River

Robert Kennedy Bridge
Road to hell. I made room for this Canadian. Then waited 20 minutes to cross the East River. Transportation workers appeared, disappeared, reappeared. Waited. Inquired when it was finally my turn at the window, “Whats up with that?” Response, Canadians… They never bring their money.

Moses, Goldschmid and Brown

interstate 405 and 5
I had heard a shortened story of Portland’s 1970’s freeway kill-off. The beginning of Portland exceptionalism. Saying No to the FHWA.
And so rarely leaving the Chesapeake Bay watershed I imagined a city comprised of narrow tree-lined streets, generous bike and pedestrian provisions, 264 foot city blocks lining the Williamette River.
Yes, well not exactly.
So they did say no, and they did leverage a bunch of public transit money and it is amazing. But it is not the idyll of my imagination.

Interstates
In 1974 Portland killed the Mount Hood Freeway, in 1979 the I-505 connector was taken off the table. But, in contrast to my imagined Portland, interstates were built.

Slow way home

schoolchildren in Okinawa
saw a movie yesterday written by UVA professor Leonard Shoppa,

poster
  In Japan, 98 percent of children walk to school every day, unaccompanied by a parent.  In the United States, just 13 percent of children walk or bike to school, and most are driven to school by a parent.

smart cae
The Slow Way Home explores this divergence, examining how American families have largely given up on keeping our streets and public spaces safe enough for children, while Japanese communities have mobilized to keep their streets safe and walkable, not only for children but for everyone in society.