On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

Yesterday I finally cleaned the Mountain View Bike Boulevard in both directions: not a single navigational fault. That's a non-trivial accomplishment: it's a maze. Most of the "Bike Boulevard" is described in this preliminary report from 2004 . Mountain View has a problem: its streets are generally newer than those of the communities further north, and that's not a good thing. They were designed in the age of the supremacy of the car: wide roads designed for high-speed, high-capacity car traffic. Both the speed and capacity are illusionary: the wide roads intersect at controlled intersections with extremely long light cycles, the long cycles mandated by a combination dedicated left-turn phases and providing pedestrians sufficient time to cross the long distance from curb-to-curb during green. They're a disaster of urban planning. Two major routes, not counting freeways, from Palo Alto to Sunnyvale through Mountain View are Middlefield to the north and C...

Rendering of high speed rail car passing electrified Caltrain along Brisbane Lagoon I just fired off a letter to the editor of the Palo Alto Daily News . A loud vocal objection has been voiced to the impact high speed rail will have on quality of life. However, the proposed alternative is always that the would-be passengers will stay peacefully at home. To the contrary, if they aren't on the train, they'll be flying or driving. Flying requires valuable land for airport expansion, and more planes roaring overhead. More cars on the road? 101 and 280 are incredibly disruptive on communities, on local access, on noise, on air quality, on public safety, and on aesthetics. I experience this every day, living close to 101 and 280. I far, far prefer investment in rail to dumping more precious resources into inefficient automobile or air infrastructure. Transportation investment is always a matter of damage mitigation, whether it is in walking or cycling trails or in projects o...