Earlier (before the discussion of whether the city should collect data on bicyclists and pedestrians was hijacked into a discussion of funding bike/ped facilities vs those for motor vehicles) I said this: ---------------------------------- If the city doesn't have the money to collect the data on bicyclists and pedestrians as well as motor vehicles before planning and spending money on transportation infrastructure, perhaps for the next several decades we should organize a group of volunteers that could provide useful data to the transportation planners and engineers on motor vehicle use, particularly regarding counts that would be of interest to the motoring community. --------------------------------
Since then, I've noticed that the city has hose (automated motor vehicle)counts going on Jenifer St and Dayton St, and a couple other places I forget. Both Jenifer and Dayton Streets have a tremendous number of bicyclists and pedestrians on them, probably approaching, if not exceeding, the number of motor vehicles on them, though we have no way of knowing that since the city is not (to my knowledge) counting bikes or peds in either spot. Today I had business near the hose counter on Dayton St between East Campus Mall and Park St, and in one 2-3 minute period at lunch time (long enough for the light at Park St to complete a full cycle) I counted about twice as many bicyclists as cars. And the pedestrians, who far outnumbered the bicyclists, were way too numerous for me to count. So here's one excellent example of us as a city meticulously collecting motor vehicle data on which future transportation planning will be based, while having no idea nor making any attempt at collecting the number of other road users on the same transportation system. Lastly, before the trolls come out to play, I should note that Jenifer St, where the other hose counter is located, HAS NO BICYCLE FACILITIES ON IT. So the issue of funding Jenifer St is irrelevant for my point, which is that we use data to make transportation plans, but we're only collecting the data on one user group. Vision studies in the middle part of the last century involved subjects who were all or mostly men. Since then, we've discovered: 1) that "color blindness" (which is actually a colloquial name for several different conditions)primarily affects only males, and 2) that 2/3 of women have a different number and proportion of rods and cones than men, and, hence, have what has been termed "super color vision." Counting one transportation user group without counting all of them is just as antiquated as thinking that studying men and only men will tell us everything we need to know about humans. chuck _______________________________________________ Bikies mailing list [email protected] http://lists.danenet.org/listinfo.cgi/bikies-danenet.org
