The Transportation and Mass Transit Megathread

[Nash_12South]

I walked pass a stack of scooters on a corner of 12 South yesterday. I do mean a stack, haphazardly strewn. On Demonbreun (at 8th) yesterday, 4 were weaving among the cars stopped for the light (including mine). Their stay in Nashville is doomed.....at least for the near future.

[timmay143]

Saw this a couple of days ago.  Metro Public Works installing some scooter corrals.

 

 

[PaulChinetti]

Davidson County has already had 5 more car fatalities this year than last year (28 compared to 33) and cars take up way too much space on roads and a lot of people drive them drunk. The parking of them is haphazard and can block roads, driveways and landing areas. 

Let's ban the cars! Absolutely disgusting that the Mayor won't do anything about these cards. 

https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/safety/documents/district_06052019.pdf

Elderly Adults are responsible for way more fatalities (104 this year all of Tennessee) than younger people (45 this year all of Tennessee), we should get them off the road immediately, no questions asked, sorry elderly adults, take the bus or call a ride share.

Let's ban the elderly drivers! Absolutely disgusting that the Mayor won't do anything about these elderly drivers. 

https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/safety/documents/daily_06052019.pdf

Vehicles have already accounted for 5,699 incidents (in Davidson Country alone) that involved property damage of over $400 dollar alone in 2019! The humanity!

Let's ban the cars! Absolutely disgusting that the Mayor won't do anything about these cars that are constantly destroying property.

https://www.tn.gov/content/dam/tn/safety/documents/CrashType.pdf (page 49)

 

I've come to a conclusion, it's not the scooters that are the problem, it's designing your city for a 2 ton piece of metal that can be driven by anyone, anywhere, at anytime. With little to no infrastructure for pedestrians or any other mode of transportation.

[PruneTracy]

27 minutes ago, timmay143 said:

Saw this a couple of days ago.  Metro Public Works installing some scooter corals.

 

Now just wait a gosh-darn minute here. Are you saying that instead of being reactive and banning new forms of transportation a city can be proactive and make flexible and cost-effective changes to their infrastructure to accommodate them?

[BnaBreaker]

In regards to the scooter corrals, I appreciate the city's efforts, but I am not sure how much good they'll do given the fact that most people are too lazy and unconcerned with their neighbor's well-being to even put their shopping cart in the parking lot cart corrals.  

[Bark At The Sun]

Cincinnati Connector streetcar system.   $2 to ride for the whole day.   Wasnt the fastest mode of rail car Ive been in, but it did save some time going from the Riverfront to the Findlay Park/Brewery District.   Works great when people don't park on the tracks.

Edited June 5, 2019 by Bark At The Sun

[downtownresident]

3 minutes ago, BnaBreaker said:

In regards to the scooter corrals, I appreciate the city's efforts, but I am not sure how much good they'll do given the fact that most people are too lazy and unconcerned with their neighbor's well-being to even put their shopping cart in the parking lot cart corrals.  

Except now the city will have something clear to enforce downtown, and the scooter companies can easily pass the fine along to the person who didn’t park it in the specified area. 

[smeagolsfree]

30 minutes ago, downtownresident said:

Except now the city will have something clear to enforce downtown, and the scooter companies can easily pass the fine along to the person who didn’t park it in the specified area. 

Metro is not going to enforce it! Trust me, as they are short on manpower to send the scooter police around writing tickets.

[donNdonelson2]

Metro doesn’t even enforce cars parked all day at expired meters or cars left in lanes marked “No Parking 4:00 to 5:30.” Traffic and parking control in our city is a complete joke, I’m sorry to say.

[Nash_12South]

12 minutes ago, donNdonelson2 said:

Metro doesn’t even enforce cars parked all day at expired meters or cars left in lanes marked “No Parking 4:00 to 5:30.” Traffic and parking control in our city is a complete joke, I’m sorry to say.

This was a year or two ago, but the head of traffic and parking said (at a meeting I attended) they only had 2 individuals whose sole job was enforcement and they worked M-F and went home at 4:30. This was at a meeting regarding residential permit parking and how it would be enforced.

The police just don't have the resources. We get the government we are willing to pay for.

Edited June 5, 2019 by Nash_12South

[CenterHill]

1 hour ago, PaulChinetti said:

Davidson County has already had 5 more car fatalities this year than last year (28 compared to 33) and cars take up way too much space on roads and a lot of people drive them drunk. The parking of them is haphazard and can block roads, driveways and landing areas. 

Let's ban the cars! Absolutely disgusting that the Mayor won't do anything about these cards. 

 

If people start driving cars on the sidewalks and leaving cars strewn randomly in the pedestrian right of way, then yep, we would have to crack down on cars, too.     

[CenterHill]

Article about Paris' love/hate relationship with scooters.    Paris is forecast to have 40,000 scooters by the end of the year!    

An electric scooter scourge is stalking Paris

https://www.ft.com/content/b994895e-83a6-11e9-b592-5fe435b57a3b

As a pedestrian or cyclist you usually don’t hear them coming, unless you catch the faint whine of the motor as the electric scooter hurtles past you, revealing the rear view of a couple of laughing teenagers, a Chinese tourist, or a French businessman — buttocks tightly clenched as he balances on the scooter’s tiny platform — on his way to work.

Paris in 2019 is a chaotic experimental playground for all kinds of new electric vehicles, but among them it is the ubiquitous trottinette that currently dominates the streets — and unfortunately also the pavements — of the French capital. (To avoid confusion, it should be explained that these trottinettes, with wheels the size of those on a supermarket trolley, are the electric version of a child’s scooter; in France un scooter is a small motorcycle).

At first glance this electric free-for-all seems like good news for the environment, the people of Paris and the sharing economy. But it cannot last. The number of trottinettes offered for rent by a dozen companies such as Lime, Bird and Tier is forecast to rise from 15,000 to about 40,000 by the end of the year. They jostle for space not only with old-fashioned bicycles (that’s me) and vehicles running on diesel or petrol but also with shared electric cars, electric-assisted bicycles such as Uber’s bright-red Jump, and privately owned electric skateboards and electric monowheels, a kind of stand-up unicycle balanced by gyroscopes and accelerometers.

In a nation ferociously keen on introducing, if not enforcing, bureaucratic rules, it all screams out for regulation of the sort already applied in early-adopting cities such as San Francisco. And regulation is coming, first from local authorities, then from big city mayors such as those of Paris and Bordeaux and finally from the national government.

The first problem is safety. The tiny wheels make the scooters hard to use on the many cobbled streets of Paris. Few users wear helmets or obey the rules of the road, and anecdotal evidence suggests many riders and pedestrians have been injured.

Then there is the parking, or rather the lack of it. Pedestrians in Paris must navigate around scooters thrown carelessly across the pavement or abandoned in doorways, because most rental companies do not have docking stations. “It’s incredibly ugly,” complains Gaspard Gantzer, who is campaigning to be elected as the city’s next mayor in 2020. “And Paris is the world’s most beautiful city.”

Inevitably, French cities are hastily designating parking areas and starting to fine users and rental companies that fail to comply. “Hear this, electric scooter operators,” declared a frustrated Jérôme Coumet, mayor of Paris’s 13th arrondissement, in a video posted on Twitter two weeks ago. “Electric scooters badly parked on the pavements — it’s over. We will organise regular collection and systematic removal to the vehicle pound. It’s enough. I will give no quarter.”

Even the environmental, commercial and social benefits of the electric trottinettes are questionable. Every morning and evening, conventionally powered vans drive all over Paris to pick up the stray scooters and take them away for charging. The recharging is often done by freelance “juicers” who plug them in at home to earn some pocket money.

The trottinettes, furthermore, are frequently abused and vandalised. (Why, I asked my two daughters the other day, are there so many bikes and scooters hurled into the Seine? “Because boys exist,” they replied. But that is another story.)

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that the average rental e-scooter had a lifespan of just three months, whereas it took almost four months for a rental company to break even on its investment in the product. In Paris, the average lifespan is probably a lot less, and Mr Gantzer reckons some last less than a month.

If you take a stroll along the recently pedestrianised left bank of the Seine in central Paris on a Sunday morning, you are bound to witness the good and the bad of a trottinette craze that may be reaching its peak: tourists and Parisians being carried swiftly and silently between the Ile de la Cité and the Eiffel Tower; but also the half-drowned carcasses of high-tech scooters and e-bikes that have been flung into the river the night before.

[PaulChinetti]

7 minutes ago, CenterHill said:

If people start driving cars on the sidewalks and leaving cars strewn randomly in the pedestrian right of way, then yep, we would have to crack down on cars, too.     

Except like the people above said, there are apparently 2 people to enforce parking rules for the entire city. 

 

One group I would love to hear from is the crowd way earlier in the thread that said the free market would be better at solving this problem than the government. Hopefully they aren't the same people now saying that the government should come in and ban them. 

[PruneTracy]

1 hour ago, CenterHill said:

buttocks tightly clenched as he balances on the scooter’s tiny platform

Am I the only person who thought this was an odd thing to fixate on?

[donNdonelson2]

3 minutes ago, PruneTracy said:

Am I the only person who thought this was an odd thing to fixate on?

Let’s ask Dr. Freud.

[Bark At The Sun]

  

[smeagolsfree]

Someone needs to unclog the drains. 

[PaulChinetti]

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/biking-lanes-business-health-1.5165954

5 ways bike-lanes are good for city businesses:

1. boost retail sales
2. cyclists can be big spenders
3. boost urban home values
4. bike-lane projects create more jobs than road projects
5. bike-lanes attract talented workers 

[AronG]

Just watched some of the "infrastructure delivery" meeting they had last Wed on sidewalks and bikeways. CM Henderson did a great job chairing it, and tried to get to the bottom of who decided to delay the downtown bike lanes (around the 1 hours 25 minute mark). Briley's director of public works basically won't answer the question.

https://www.nashville.gov/News-Media/News-Article/ID/8610/Special-Meeting-of-the-Public-Works-Committee-May-29-2019.aspx

 

[downtownresident]

Noticed while on a walk today that B-cycle has brought their electric assist bikes to Nashville! 

[AsianintheNations]

On 6/9/2019 at 10:36 AM, PaulChinetti said:

5 ways bike-lanes are good for city businesses:

1. boost retail sales
2. cyclists can be big spenders
3. boost urban home values
4. bike-lane projects create more jobs than road projects
5. bike-lanes attract talented workers  

Great points! The bike lanes that are now present on the medium-sized roads in my area (Murphy, 51st, etc.), in conjunction with a network of relatively wide low-traffic local streets, have made moving around by bike fairly straightforward ... but I have been frustrated by the scarcity of legitimate places to lock my bike at actual destinations. I would suspect this is in part why of the relatively modest number of people who use the bike lanes, far fewer look like they are using them to run errands or get to work as I would ideally like to do. Like all the sidewalks gaps on major thoroughfares (e.g. why on Earth is there no sidewalk along the western edge of Centennial Park on 31st Ave to connect to One City?? which just lost its own sidewalks with the new construction anyway), these little unfilled gaps really ruin the rest of the effort.

[Buildtall]

I friend of mine is in Pittsburgh today and snapped a picture of something we don’t have in Nashville . . . . YET!

TIKI Bar Boats

[MLBrumby]

  Fire hazard meets drowning hazard. 

[AsianintheNations]

Terrifying ... I suppose the natural progression in vehicular beotchization would be a duck boat bar that traverses both land and sea, and then I guess a bar on a blimp?

Edit: I am very amused at the word substitution that seems to have automatically been applied to the word I typed after "vehicular." Seems to be an UrbanPlanet-ism?

Edited June 16, 2019 by AsianintheNations

[japan]

14 hours ago, Buildtall said:

I friend of mine is in Pittsburgh today and snapped a picture of something we don’t have in Nashville . . . . YET!

TIKI Bar Boats

I'm sure that will come if we ever figure out how to active the river that runs right through the middle of the city....