Cycling, traffic safety, traffic justice, and legal topics; energy, transit and transportion economics
In a recurring theme, the air is polluted in Phoenix. Ground level ozone — formed by burning fossil fuels resulting in NOX and VOC emissions which forms smog — being the main culprit.
From the American Lung Association’s State of the Air report; Phoenix clocks in at 5th worst city for Ozone, and 9th for year round particulates.
Poor air quality is a direct threat to human health. Continue reading “Air Pollution in Phoenix?”
Cities by Diana is absolutely the best car-centric satire content… Diana does Phoenix! Get ready for a fast paced, gasmaxxed, lane-pilled joyride thru town!
Do you HATE being forced to go outside and take PUBLIC TRANSIT? MOVE YOUR GOON CAVE TO PHOENIX ARIZONA! 🌞🌵👩🏻🛣️
https://www.tiktok.com/@citiesbydiana/video/7336788560152120622
After appropriating $400MM of GENERAL FUNDS last season in order to widen the I-10 freeway between ~ just south of Phoenix to Casa Grande (towards Tucson); the legislature this year is on track to appropriate ANOTHER $360MM (also general funds) to the project, to backfill currently unavailable federal matching funds.
SB1065 appropriation; widening; I-10
Just to re-cap, general funds come from things like state sales taxes, property taxes, and income taxes. Notably, they do not come from gas-taxes, or other motor vehicle user fees. Continue reading “AZ Republican’s war on walking continues”
Parents would get paid to take their kids to school under Arizona bill
Meanwhile year-after-year-after-year our stalwart legislators have failed to generate adequate revenue to fund highway construction and maintenance for going on 30 years; leading to either both deferred maintenance and other funding sources, like sales taxes that are totally non-user fee based. Meanwhile “the big lie”, that drivers pay their way, get passed along by opponents of cycling. Continue reading “Arizona legislature busy working on more subsidized driving”
6/3/2019 morning peak time. Another* one. This time the NW corner of Ray and 48th St; a high-volume hi-speed arterial intersection. Hopefully no one was killed; but of course that would just be luck — the car drove right over the sidewalk to eliminate the pole.
This is/will cause major traffic disruptions; it’s still blocked a day later and the workmen told me it is likely to take a week to 10 days.(it was ultimately 8 days). The right-hand westbound thru lane on Ray will be blocked until the project is finished; and the Southbound RTO and bike lanes are also blocked. Continue reading “Driver jumps curb and knocks down signal pole”
4/23/2019 ~ 11pm victim Thomas Taraba and another person were walking on the sidewalk along McDowell Road near 37th Street. Police say river 20-year-old Zachary Showers was the driver; he was arrested on suspicion of DUI
“According to court documents, Taraba was thrown 75 feet” indicating the driver’s speed was very fast, perhaps too fast for any city street. 12news.com. a few more details at fox10news.
Continue reading “Vision Zero PHX, was: PD: Driver kills man on sidewalk”
This new and much-needed fee is the result of weak and/or duplicitous politicians who have neglected to honestly fund transportation in Arizona for decades; despite sporadic efforts that always fail in Arizona’s Republican-controlled legislature. They are so stridently, and uniformly ideological that they can’t even admit that gas tax revenue, because of the way it’s structured, have been going steadily down in real terms, for well over twenty years. The same is true at the federal level as well. Continue reading “Public Safety Fee going into effect”
Thanks to Holman Jenkins for reminding us, from time to time (here’s one from 2008!), there is still, over 50 years later, a “chicken tax” which places a 25% tariff on imported “trucks”; this helps to distort the automobile market. In his column 3/31/2018 Your Pickup Truck Takes You for a Ride, he pithily summarizes the on-going situation: Continue reading “Your Pickup Truck Takes You for a Ride”
The 0.5% sales tax that funds transportation projects in Maricopa county since 1985 is on track to come up a few billion dollars short by the time it expires in 2025. The funds are used to pay for all manner of projects including local street improvements, bus pullouts (to make car travel faster), transit including bus and light rail; by most of all and by far the most dollars are spent building highways. From a sales tax. There are those who fancy that motorists are “paying their own way”, through from example fuel taxes and VLT (vehicle license tax) but that’s just not so. These funds have been shrinking for a variety of reasons not the least of which is the major component, fuel tax, has not increased in over over twenty years.
Az Republic story Liability for government-issued vehicles on the rise Stated some of the obvious; bigger, sprawly cities tend to have more driving by public-sector workers, invariably leading to more liability costs to cities/taxpayers. Just another socialized cost of sprawl and automobility.
The sidebar has some interesting dollar figures for a number of Phoenix-metro area cities (and Maricopa county), all were costs paid out by the municipality over the period from ~ 2008 through 20012. A small, compact city like Tempe clocks in at $806K, Scottsdale is up at $2M. Scottsdale at a population of ~ 221K people is somewhat larger than Tempe’s 164K; but certainly not nearly triple! But Scottsdale’s land area at 186 sq.mi. is way larger than landlocked, mostly built-out Tempe’s 40 sq.miles.
Phoenix is of course the 500 pound gorilla: $23M paid out, with 1.5M people, and a whopping 517 sq. miles of land area.
Statistically speaking, Chandler seems to have a quite-low payout ratio; $203K, 240K population and 58 sq.miles — so maybe Scottsdale is just an outlier 🙂
The AAA puts out a report on the costs of operating a car each year, and are always fun… figure a ballpark of 60 cents a mile. It’s been my experience that car owners are in consistent denial, other than chronic moaning about the price of fuel, about the high costs of automobility. (and fuel ends up being only about 1/4th of the overall cost). And these costs only represent direct costs; socialized costs (pollution, policing, mayhem, free and subsidized parking, various non-fuel taxes, etc) are not even attempted to be measured here.
“A new AAA reports shows, on average, the cost of driving 15,000 miles a year rose 1.17 cents to 60.8 cents per mile, or $9,122 per year. Overall, that’s a roughly 2% increase on the cost of operating a car last year.” usatoday
An op-ed written by one of the wsj editorial board staffers illustrates a certain strain of belief in have-your-cake-and-eat-too-sism. Kaminski, in decrying how the mayor Mike McGinn (whom he gleefully points out is referred to as mayor McSchwinn by his political foes. Get it? it rhymes with McGinn) of Seattle worked to block the building of some car-based project; later claims that “Seattleites say they want to save the planet from global warming, but in their personal lives they want safe streets…”.
The disconnect Kaminski, and others of his ideological ilk, is this; that somehow streets can be made safer by ever-expanding the number and speed of privately operated motor vehicles. But this is simply not possible. Faster and more always equals more dead; mostly more motorists, but also more dead peds, and more dead bicyclists. The numbers are stark; comparing e.g. Phoenix with Seattle (metro areas), the Dangerous by Design survey estimates Phoenix to be FOUR TIMES more deadly to pedestrians than Seattle. The number spills over not just in pedestrian deaths, but also cyclists deaths, and also to MOTORISTS deaths; see e.g. Beyond Safety in Numbers: why bike friendly cities are safer (for everybody).
Thus Kaminski rejects car-user-fees as hair-brained; yet motorists are the source of enormous externalities — economic impacts that aren’t paid for by their users — from air pollution (never mind ‘global warming’), to mayhem, to free parking.
By the way, McGinn has only been mayor for the past two years; I’m not suggesting that McGinn has made it safer. It was already safe, relatively speaking — due in no small part to its general overall “anti-car” culture.
Seattle DOT (SDOT) puts out a fancy traffic safety report (every year, i imagine), e.g. here is 2011. Note the “speed studies”, p 7-7… their major streets are posted speed limits of mostly 35, with a few at 30, and one at 45. The 85th percentile speeds were running in the high 30’s.
What? a sales tax to build freeways? Why yes, it’s true — sales, and other general funds are often used to build roads and freeways. Though this particular tax (the prop 400 one-half percent general sales tax) supposedly goes to pay for all sorts of transportation projects — including light rail, local street improvements, buses, roads and freeways — the largest amount goes to build or expand limited-access freeways. These freeways in particular aren’t even open to bicyclists; but, along with everybody else, must pay the sales tax. Oh, and it’s not as though bicyclists are left out; bicycle and pedestrian improvements combined get 2% of the funds.
What about fuel and other specific use taxes (like the VLT… for more, see Road Taxes)? They’re simply not enough. Automobility does not generate enough tax revenue to sustain itself, thus these subsidies to drivers paid from general funds. Not to mention any of the litany of externalities caused by driving — free parking, pollution, mayhem, etc.
Some Valley freeway projects will be delayed up to five years by a sharp downturn in revenues prompted in part by the recession, regional transportation officials say.
Proposition 400, approved by Maricopa County voters in 2004, imposed a countywide half-cent sales tax for 20 years to fund regional transit projects – freeways, streets, buses and light rail.
maricopa-county-proposition-400-funds-shortage.html
Here are a few of the ins-and-outs of this tax, as you can see it started in 1985, was renewed for another 20 year run starting in 2005 — in other words it is more or less permanent; see e.g. this AzRepublic article (my emphasis added):
Q: What does Proposition 400 do?
A: It would extend for another 20 years a half-cent transportation sales tax in Maricopa County that was first approved in 1985 to fund freeway construction. Without voter approval for an extension, the tax expires at the end of 2005.
Q: How much would be spent on each type of transportation in the MAG plan?
A: Of the $15.8 billion dedicated to program funding, $9 billion, or 57 percent, would fund freeways; $2.7 billion, or 17 percent, would fund the regional bus system; $2.3 billion, or 15 percent, would fund light-rail expansion; and $1.5 billion, or 9 percent, would fund arterial streets.
The remaining 2 percent would fund air-quality programs, bike and pedestrian routes and planning activities.
Apparently there is a mandated audit to be performed every five years by the AZ Auditor General, here is the detailed report. The AZ Republic did a news story timed with its release, though it didn’t say much.
The detailed report has some pie charts that don’t exactly match up with the Q&A; for example it shows, in percentages exactly 3 components: Freeways 56.2, Transit 33.3, and Arterials 10.5% One guesses that the 2 percent catch-all (which includes bike and ped planning) is snuck in somewhere. The report gives no details on the ancillary activities. Oh, and I learned a new acronym: RARF, the Regional Area Road Fund is where the prop 400 sales tax monies go. (the HURF, Highway User Revenue Fund, is where motor fuel taxes and vlt goes).
The light rail came off pretty well; noting the thing was built on schedule and just slightly under-budget. Peer-city comparisons were generally favorable.
…the season apparently just started in April 2011. Pollution — nobody wants to pay… Our state politicians want to block more stringent new-car standards. And meanwhile complain that the excessive number of alerts/advisories is caused by tightening air-quality standards.
State officials posted the Valley’s eighth ozone pollution advisory of the season Tuesday, a fact clean-air activists noted repeatedly as they argued against a plan to repeal Arizona’s vehicle-emissions rules barely six months after they took effect. Arizona’s plan to cut clean-car program criticized by activists
Superhuman-sized objects moving at superhuman speeds are dangerous. Inherently. But who bears this danger? Motorist liability insurance is one supposed motivator; in theory motorists are supposed to bear the cost of the risks they are inflicting on others, but has many limitations (see e.g. The Disneyland Model). In reality this risk-spreading ends up socializing the costs of driving — paid for by others, subsidized, also called an externality. Thus we get more driving, because it is artificially cheap, and more traffic death and destruction.
It is worth pointing out to nervous cyclists that the large majority of traffic death and destruction is done by drivers of automobiles to other motorists (see, e.g. the chart here). This is to be expected, of course, since the large majority of traffic is motoring.
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Here are a couple of recent, local incidents… out of control “accidents” all —
Girl critically injured, was standing on the sidewalk, May 6, 2011: Deette Lynn Perry, 54, was arrested Friday after she was discharged from the hospital, where she had been admitted following the May 6 incident, Sgt. Steve Martos of the Phoenix Police Department said. Perry was in a 2004 Nissan Altima near Thomas Road and 23rd Avenue when she drove onto the sidewalk and struck a 17-year-old girl, Martos said. Police suspect Perry was impaired by drugs, Martos said. The girl suffered a fractured pelvis and severe head injuries, Martos said.
Another:
Tourist killed at Phoenix intersection The Arizona Republic, Glen Creno – Aug. 19, 2010
An Australian tourist crossing a Phoenix street was killed late Tuesday when a sport-utility vehicle slammed into him, authorities said Wednesday…The SUV was moving so fast the victim was dismembered by the impact. Witnesses told police the vehicle apparently ran a red light…Ramzy Khalil, 29, of New South Wales, Continue reading “Are Cars Dangerous?”