MyWHaT

This past Wednesday night’s community input regarding, as the consultant phrased it, “the opportunities” and “the concerns” for the proposed Boardman Lake Avenue Development project left me without much clarity for the direction the City will ultimately take. The discussion continues and the interest in the MyWHaT Pros and Cons post is the top hit three days in a row. Please, contribute to the discussion.

Weekly Chatter

• Sad: dangerous by design in NWL Michigan

• The value of a single life: do I hear $10-million?

• Person on Board –> _ –> _ –> _ –>

• In Traverse City and obsessed with free parking

• Michigan as a leader in Road-Diets? Maybe.

• The American Dream vs,. Reality (via our Canadian friends)

• Tom Vanderbilt writes about how bike commuters and motorists are often living in different worlds and how that leads to push back for the very designs that are proven to save lives and improve conditions for everyone. A Grist writer spins off Vanderbilt’s piece to ask: “Why do people in cars hate people on bikes so much?“

• The civic & political need for public spaces: “Local commons become the site of celebrations, festivals, art events, memorial services and other expressions of a community.“

Twitterville

• RT(@tomvanderbilt) Scofflaw drivers — and the cyclists they kill.
• RT (@lutzfernandez) Absurd but increasingly common: polls taken by media asking for opinions on questions to which the answer is a fact.
• RT (@paulbatt) Yo Bus Driver! Morning rush hour traffic is not the time to practice turning left from the right lane. K?

To Wrap

Ah, an ode to the sharrow. Have you seen the sharrow map for TC?

View Sharrow suggestions for Traverse City in a larger map

Have a Weekend.

Graphic Friday

(click for larger view)

National Building Museum created this graphic in their Intelligent Cities program. Using numbers from AAA, the average American spends $8,485/annually on an automobile. Of that amount, only $1,390 stays in the local economy. The rest, $7,095 per vehicle, leaves the local economy.

Is that intelligent? Is it intelligent for a community to subsidize and facilitate car ownership?

In Traverse City, let’s assume of the 14,000 residents that there is 70% car ownership or around 10,000 primary vehicles. If only 1% of us chose  to give up a car (walk & bike more, ride-share, bus and rent instead), with these numbers that would be $709,500 NOT leaving the economy.

It is a modest goal, 100 fewer cars, but with a big payoff. If we are feeling frisky, we could go for 1000 fewer cars and be that much more resilient as a local economy.

Of course, there are likely other factors to consider, but it isn’t like we haven’t seen this before: Where Your Gas Dollar Goes?.