(Source: You Tube)

The Norwegian Motorcycle Union has made this hard-hitting PSA that aims to promote an awareness among car & truck drivers who often don’t look out for motorcyclists on the road.  Starting from the fact that 8 out of 10 collisions are caused by drivers that never see the motorcycle.  The “Motorcycle Accident Cause Factors and Identification of Countermeasures,” was a study conducted by the University of Southern California, with funds from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, researcher Harry Hurt investigated nearly every aspect of 900 motorcycle accidents in the Los Angeles area. Additionally, Hurt and his staff analyzed 3,600 motorcycle traffic accident reports in the same geographic area.  Some of the study findings listed below, among a grand total of 53, are directly attributed to the negligence of motorists:

• Approximately three-fourths of the motorcycle accidents involved collision with another vehicle, which was most usually a passenger automobile.
• The failure of motorists to detect and recognize motorcycles in traffic is the predominating cause of motorcycle accidents. The driver of the other vehicle involved in collision with the motorcycle did not see the motorcycle before the collision, or did not see the motorcycle until too late to avoid the collision.

Location:

National Capital Planning Commission

401 9th St NW, 5th Floor

Washington, DC 20004

Date: 9/30/2009 from 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm

Hosted By: Coalition for Smarter Growth

RSVP by: September 30, 2009 at 3:00 pm

Bike Culture and Policies in Denmark

The cool factor of the bicycle has come a long way in the U.S., but nowhere is it as mainstream to bike in your suit and tie or your fashionable dress as it is in European cities like Copenhagen. Danish bike culture, often called “cycle chic”, is central to the Danes’ approach to sustainable living, and one of the key factors in their ability to remain energy independent.  This supportive culture combines with supportive transportation infrastructure to make biking the mode of choice for nearly one-third of local trips in Denmark, compared to just 1% of local trips in the United States. What have the Danish done to make biking a national habit?

Join us for a lecture and discussion with Mikael Colville-Andersen with an introduction by Andy Clarke. A film-maker, speaker and writer, Mr. Colville-Andersen has actively branded Copenhagen as the leading bike city in the world. Check out his two blogs: www.copenhagencyclechic.com andwww.copenhagenize.com.

Speakers:
Mikael Colville-Andersen, Copenhagenize.com
Andy Clarke, Executive Director, League of American Bicyclists
Eric Gilliland, Executive Director, WABA
Cheryl Cort, Policy Director, Coalition for Smarter Growth

Event sponsors:
Coalition for Smarter Growth, WABA, and League of American Bicyclists

(Source: Washington Post)

Forget about getting more money for Metro or whether to fire the general manager. The real issue is poor customer service: mysterious train halts, boarded-up escalators, rude station attendants.

That, at least, is the view of a bearded, 41-year-old former news reporter who writes the successful gadfly blog with the off-color title Unsuck DC Metro. He doesn’t want his name published, saying he’s received several threats over blog posts that embarrassed Metro employees. On that condition, however, he agreed to meet for lunch for his first full interview and discuss what he thinks ails Metro following the toughest three months in the transit system’s 33-year history.

The blogger, whose site is http://unsuckdcmetro.blogspot.com, bases his judgment partly on personal experience but mostly on the thousands of e-mails, comments, photographs and Twitter messages he’s received since he started in January. He gets more than 1,000 hits a day and has nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter — very near the approximately 1,650 following Metro’s own Twitter site.

General Manager John B. Catoe Jr., whose contract was just extended for three years, should pay attention. The bloggers have come to speak for Metro’s core customers and serve as a kind of collective conscience for the system.

To its credit, Metro responds to bloggers’ queries and, despite some understandable tensions, deals with them professionally. Other bloggers following Metro include Greater Greater Washington, Moving Momentarily, Why I Hate DC, Infosnack and DCist (along with such mainstream media blogs as The Post’s Get There, which features Dr. Gridlock).

Mr. Unsuck decided to blog after he changed jobs in November and began commuting regularly on the Orange Line. He was surprised when trains stopped regularly mid-trip and when, in his first week, he had to get off and wait three or four times when a train was suddenly taken out of service. Compared with foreign systems he knew, “I just felt there was something wrong with this one,” he said.

His blogging is part-time and unpaid. On slow days, he works on the blog for 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes after work. A lengthy posting might take several hours. The lunch I bought him (his share was $27.50) was the first material benefit he’d received.

Click here to read the entire article.

Note: Transportgooru congratulates fellow bloggers Greater Greater Washington, Moving Momentarily, Why I Hate DC, Infosnack and DCist for the great job they have done in getting the Metro to pay attention to the Metro riders’ issues.   If anything, the community is glad to have these platforms to share their agonizing commuter tales & Metro’s woeful performance/behavior.   Hat tip to all these bloggers for their community service!

Washington, DC is known as the power capital of the world. But on September 29 it’s going to be transformed to the CLEAN DIESEL POWER capital of the world.

Image Source: NG Oil & Gas (via Jalopnik) Click to Enlarge

The saying goes like this: A picture is worth a thousand words. But this picture shown above is worth all the words you ever want to write about our addiction to foreign oil.  What is striking in this picture is the fact that almost everyone of these top 10 nations where we get our oil from, with the exception of Brazil & Canada, has been battling or contributing to violence in its own soil or in foreign soil through covert (at times overt) funding for terror groups & radical factions.  Hope our Government as well as the citizens start thinking about ways to curb this problem.  A good start would be to look at the type(s) of vehicle sitting in our driveway and ask yourself this question “Do I really need this vehicle?”  If possible, downsize to something that makes sense (a v10 or v8 for a daily commute to work does not make sense).  Just by doing that, you are not only contributing to a greener planet but also towards limiting the funds flowing to gunslingers and bomb makers in these hot spots.

(Source: Jalopnik & Oil and Gas News via Cool Infographics)

(Sources: Reuters & The Detroit News)

Major automakers today endorsed a ban on texting and using hand-held mobile phones while driving, ahead of a Transportation Department summit next week on distracted driving.

“Clearly, using a hand-held device to text or call while driving is a safety risk,” said Dave McCurdy, president and CEO of the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers. “The alliance supports a ban on hand-held texting and calling while driving to accelerate the transition to more advanced, safer ways to manage many common potential distractions.”The alliance represents 11 automakers, including Detroit’s Three automakers, Toyota Motor Corp., Daimler AG and BMW AG.

McCurdy said using a mobile phone without a hands-free device or scrolling through a cellular phone’s list of phone numbers may put drivers at risk.

But the industry strongly supports allowing hands-free devices to make calls. Some states ban the use of cell phones by drivers without using a hands-free device. “You have to minimize the eyes off the road time. That’s critical,” McCurdy said.

This announcement is a boost for the Obama administration’s efforts to curb this growing problem.  Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood plans to hold a summit next week on distracted driving and address the issue of texting.

“If it were up to me, I would ban drivers from texting,” LaHood said in August. “But we’ve learned from our efforts to get people to wear seat belts and to persuade them not to drive drunk that laws aren’t always enough. Often, you need to combine education with enforcement to get results.”

The wireless industry — including cellphone manufacturers, carriers, and some Internet companies represented by the CTIA-Wireless Association — also believes texting “is incompatible with safe driving.”

The trade group supports state and local efforts to ban texting and driving as well as public education and aggressive enforcement.

There were more than 1 trillion text messages sent and received on wireless devices last year, including cell phones and smart phones, the association said. There are no statistics on how many people drive and text, the group said.  A Virginia Tech Transportation Institute study released in July said drivers of heavy vehicles using a hand-held text messaging system had 23.2 times as high a risk of a crash than drivers who weren’t.

The National Safety Council, a research group, is pushing for a full ban on cell phone use and texting while driving.

About a dozen U.S. states have passed laws banning texting while driving. A handful have made cellphone use illegal while behind the wheel, a practice that automakers do not oppose in all circumstances.

Legislation proposed by Sen. Charles Schumer of New York would withhold 25 percent of federal highway money from states that do not ban texting while driving and the provision is similar to one that enticed states to adopt a 0.08 percent blood alcohol level limit for drunken driving.  A text-while-driving ban has also been proposed in the House of Representatives.

Click here or here to get more details on this story.

(Source: New York Times & Associated Press)

Like most large international conferences, the United Nations climate summit meeting in New York this week generated a hefty dose of greenhouse gas emissions.

Hundreds of presidents, prime ministers and officials from across the globe this week took airplanes to the United Nations meeting, some accompanied by dozens of people. Limousines and motorcades ferried the dignitaries from airports to meetings to hotels and back, often getting stuck in Midtown Manhattan gridlock.

But since the goal of this meeting was to reduce the global emissions that have been linked to global warming, the United Nations decided to try to do something about all the carbon dioxide produced by the delegates: it bought carbon offsets.

Under a new and expanding program for offsetting emissions, United Nations administrators calculated that the meeting would generate the equivalent of 461 tons of carbon dioxide, with air travel being the single largest component. They offset those emissions by directing money to a power project in rural Andhra Pradesh, India, through which agricultural leftovers like rice husks and sunflower stalks are turned into electricity for the local grid.

The offsets are intended to cancel out the carbon dioxide emissions created by airline travel or driving by financing green projects that will eliminate as much CO2 as the polluting activities create.

The United Nations first tried its hand at large-scale offsets two years ago, shortly after Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, who called Tuesday’s conference, took office and declared that climate issues would be a central theme of his tenure.

“The secretary general started talking about greening the U.N. and that we needed to lead by example,” said Dan Shepard, a United Nations spokesman in New York.

(Source: Transportation for America; USA Today)

A yearly census survey released Monday illustrates the continuation of a trend that started well before the recession: Americans are taking steps to reduce their dependence on cars, and are looking for other options for getting around. The daily drumbeat of high unemployment, home foreclosures and plummeting retail sales drowns out a less obvious impact of the recession: its influence on America’s lifestyle.  Rates of solo driving and car ownership are dropping, according to this story in the USA Today about new census data. The paper cites a census report showing drops in both Americans who drove alone to work and in overall car ownership.

Commuting. The share of workers who drove to work alone has dropped to 75.5% from 76% the past two years — a possible consequence of high gas prices and the recession.

(Sources Contributing to this Hybrid Report:  Streetsblog; PBS -The Dig; Journal of Commerce)

Every six years the law authorizing national transportation policy and funding needs renewal. The current law expires Sept. 30 — in nine days.The House will consider a three-month extension of the current highway bill rather than the 18-month extension the administration and Senate want. The extension will avoid a collapse of highway spending on Oct. 1, according to House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee press secretary James Berard.

Rep. James Oberstar (D., Minn.), Chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, is staunchly against an 18-month delay. As a result, it is likely he will propose a three-month extension later this week.

The 18-month extension is favored by the Senate and White House. A Senate spokesman said that the four committees with jurisdiction over the highway bill have reported legislation to the floor, but the bills have not been up for debate before the full body.

TransportGooru.com is proud to share this insightful presentation on market-based road pricing in the U.S. prepared by Mr. Glenn Havinoviski, a long time supporter of TransportGooru.com, for his recent discussion with the Public Policy program students at George Washington University in Washington, DC.

When Glenn updated his status message on LinkedIn after the classroom discussion, TransportGooru jumped on the opportunity to get a glimpse of his briefing material prepared for the class and wrote to him seeking permission to publish the briefing materials.  Glenn graciously agreed to share this excellent presentation and sent along a PDF version (shown in the PDF viewer below).   Please feel free to leave your comments/questions in the “Comments” section below and they will be brought to Glenn’s attention right away.   Thanks for sharing the presentation, Glenn.

About Glenn Havinoviski: Glenn currently serves as an Associate Vice President (Transportation Systems) at Iteris in Sterling, VA and is a registered PE.   Until recently, he was an Associate Vice President and ITS Group Director for HNTB Corporation in the Arlington, Virginia office. His 27 years of experience (25 in consulting, 2 in the public sector) include serving as both a practice builder and a practice leader, providing project management and technical leadership for ITS and traffic management projects in the US and abroad.Glenn N. Havinoviski, PE joined Iteris in Sterling, VA on July 6 as Associate VP, Transportation Systems, after serving as Associate Vice President and ITS Group Director for HNTB Corporation in the Arlington, Virginia office. His 27 years of experience (25 in consulting, 2 in the public sector) include serving as both a practice builder and a practice leader, providing project management and technical leadership for ITS and traffic management projects in the US and abroad.