Hans wrote: "Thus our challenge is to CREATE people who vote with their feet. When that happens, the PLACES we seek will occur.
How to create such people?" ------------------------------------------- By making them vote with their wallet. Then they'll vote with their feet. Transit user fees pay for about a quarter of the cost to operate PUBLIC Transit here (source, our MPO staff) Motor Vehicle user fees pay for about half of the cost of PUBLIC roads in Wisconsin - the rest of the money comes primarily from property taxes - (source, "Highway Cost and Pricing Study" prepared for WisDOT by Cambridge Systematics). Contrast this with all the places advocates point to where citizens enjoy a better quality of life (not necessarily the same as "standard of living"), such as Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Madison's sister city in Germany, Muenster, etc. All those places make the user fees for motor vehicles not only pay for ALL the costs of the roads, but also pay for some of the costs of alternatives to driving alone. Hence, it's not only cheaper, but often faster and more convenient, to walk, bus, bike, or take a train to one's destination in those places. 55% of all trips in Copenhagen are made by bicycle (and I'm pretty sure that they have winter there http://www.copenhagenize.com/2010/01/winter-bicycles-continue.html ) And to those that say that can never happen here, that's exactly what people said in Copenhagen 40 years ago, when the "car was king" in Copenhagen (http://www.copenhagenize.com/2007/11/cyclists-are-better-shoppers-than.html ), and the businesses resisted very vocally to pedestrianizing the city center. The difference is that Copenhagen, under Jan Gehl's direction, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jan_Gehl has spent four decades promoting alternatives with their pocketbooks, and we've spent four decades mostly building more and bigger highways (with some notably exceptional bike/pedestrian facilities, most of which took the better part of those four decades to build, and most of which never would have happened without the sustained hard efforts of many people on this list). chuck ________________________________ From: Hans Noeldner Sent: Tuesday, January 12, 2010 10:14 PM To: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Subject: [Bikies] Walkscore and causality Fellow Ped/Bike/Transit Advocates: This is a follow-up to Ted Voth's posting at the Madison Area Bus Advocates board yesterday: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/mabaaa/message/4910 As you can see, Ted won a Walkscore of 91! Unfortunately, his "reward" for choosing to live where such a fantastic score is possible is to endure disproportionately-high levels of automobile "runoff" generated by the tens of thousands of Dane County motorists who reside where Walkscores are lower - often FAR lower. And this is typical for other "walkable" neighborhoods like Williamson and Monroe Streets. If things were fair, those with the highest Walkscores would enjoy levels of automobile traffic as light and calm as, say, the private streets of the Bergamont Country Club here in Oregon...or the secluded "country estates" of ultra-high-VMT exurbanites scattered throughout "rural" Dane County. (This is a huge social/environmental justice issue, comparable to {and often correlating with} racial and socio-economic segregation.) Anyway, Walkscore for our house in the Village of Oregon is 69: http://www.walkscore.com/get-score.php?street=133+West+Lincoln+Street%2C+Oreg on%2C+WI Given the abundance of frequented destinations here, and the spatial arrangements of destinations and residences, I would guess at least 1/4th of Village residents would get comparable scores. However, the ratio of driving-age Village residents who drive rather than walk or bike to destinations IN THE VILLAGE is probably 50:1 or more. Oregon has plenty of sidewalks, crosswalks, and traffic signals with pedestrian-activated buttons. We even have a decent system of bike lanes and paths for a municipality of our size. If proximities and infrastructure were the primary factors in the mode-split equation, our streets and sidewalks would be buzzing with self-locomoted human beings. THEY ARE NOT. Thus we must look elsewhere for causality: our norms and expectations; our automobile-scaled perception of time and distance; our sense of entitlement to the ease, comfort, and security of our own personal multi-ton suit of motorized armor. And looming above all of these is our obstinate refusal to confront the inconvenient truth that lifestyles based on the automobile destroy and prevent the formation of "human-scale" habitat where it is safe, practical, convivial, and NORMAL to walk and bike and use transit. The roots of car culture here (as in most of Dane County) are incredibly strong and tenacious. Despite five years of advocacy I have not made any noticeable dent in mode split, not even among "sustainability" types. I suspect many advocates feel just as impotent. Why? I have come to the conclusion that we advocates undermine our efforts with the vocabulary we so often use. Rather than talking about the characteristics of THINGS (streets, neighborhoods, etc.), we should focus on behaviors - and the responsibilities of CITIZENS. Not only do terms like "walkable", "bicycle-friendly", and "transit-supportive density" make absolutely no difference in the final analysis, our use of such language tacitly shifts causality away from HUMAN BEINGS. God help us, we need pedestrian-oriented PEOPLE! Bicycle-oriented PEOPLE! Transit-oriented PEOPLE! We cannot ZONE such people into existence; they cannot be CONSUMED into existence; we cannot even FORCE them into existence by blocking automobile-centric developments. Thus our challenge is to CREATE people who vote with their feet. When that happens, the PLACES we seek will occur. How to create such people? Not by telling them that someone else is to blame for America's auto-addicted way of life; that someone else owes them easy solutions; that someone else has the power to make a truly-green "Transportation/Access Revolution" happen. We need to tell people that their choices and behaviors really matter. And that all of us have much to learn. Thus the most important thing is to challenge people to just get out there and begin occupying their communities as HUMAN BEINGS again. So long as well-meaning people remain behind that damned windshield, they will not learn the first thing about what we/collectively must do to create - not "walkable communities" - but "communities that walk"...and bike...and have enough people walking and biking to make transit viable. Perhaps our message should be in-your-face: "Stop passing the buck! Habitat follows behavior." Hans Noeldner Oregon, Wisconsin
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