Map of tram extension to Wolverhamton railway station

Friday Reads – 15 September 2023

On By In Accessibility, Friday Reads, Roads, Trolleybuses, Tunnels

• West Midlands Metro extension to Wolverhampton station opens Sunday (RailUK)

• Tame wide roads & replace them with boulevards of homes (Guardian)

• Boston replaces trolleybuses w/ shorter range, heavier battery buses to cut costs (UrbanTransport)

• Philly giving city workers free transit: Can other cities follow suit? (Streetsblog)

• Amtrak is bringing High Speed Rail to Texas?! The Texas Central Railway: Video (RMTransit)

• Brisbane’s race to build the $6.3BN Cross River Railway for the Olympics: Video (B1M)

• I use a wheelchair & I want more bike lanes (TheSpinoff)

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5 comments

  1. “I use a wheelchair & I want more bike lanes”
    Well, I’m fully-mobile & I too want more bike lanes – provided they are properly designed, or even designed at all.
    Where I live ( London Borough of Waltham Forest) we have multiple bike lanes .. – except in the few place you really need one & the lane just vanishes { Yes, really }
    Or the lanes are so badly designed that you are better off on the main road, or the lane has signs & obstacles “planted” in the middles by the same Local Authority.
    And – I can direct oy – if interested – to exact examples of all three of those – which brings us back to the original point: I can negotiate these obstacles, but I would really hate to be in a wheelchair, powered or not – and then run into one of these appalling screw-ups.

  2. While I appreciate the need for housing, building on wide roads removes irrevocably wide vistas and open sightlines for everyone, be they pedestrians or other road users. I want neither to walk nor drive nor be driven down narrow canyons, nor (I imagine) do people want to live on the sides of an echoing tunnel of constrained traffic contaminated by fumes, tyre and brake particles. It seems the worst sort of compromise, concentrating the traffic rather than shifting it.

  3. Yes, but wider roads means further to walk which means less walking. On the other hand concentrating traffic (i.e, reducing space for it) means less traffic.

    So the worst sort of compromise from a traffic focus is the best sort of compromise from a city point of view. As the saying goes, if you plan for vehicles and traffic, that’s what you’ll get; if you plan for people and places, that’s what you’ll get.

  4. We all know that yes, narrowed roads will eventually, eventually, preclude car use because after several dozen human engineered 6hr traffic holdups, who wouldn’t throw in the nearest towel if he could?
    Thing is, these mystical Parisian style Boulevards we suddenly find ourselves lumbered with are NOT wide for speed, as just about everyone is banging on about, they are wide shouldered at the corners and junctions particularly to ease traffic flow and to ‘speed’ HGVs in and out, for exactly the same flow easing measures.

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