Thanks for forwarding Schubert's message, Serge. The first paragraph below should be required reading in Portland OR, while the final paragraph further reinforces my own call for general traffic calming and speed limit reduction on prime arterials, because the current crop of neiborhood electric vehicles is restricted to streets with posted speed limits of 35mph or less, rendering them pretty useless in most of San Diego County. <br><br><b><i>Serge Issakov <serge@issakov.org></i></b> wrote:<blockquote class="replbq" style="border-left: 2px solid rgb(16, 16, 255); margin-left: 5px; padding-left: 5px;">[from John Schubert]<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">... Note that Copenhagen reported a 30 percent increase in the accident rate from their cycle tracks; Berlin reported a sharp uptick in accidents<br> when they installed sidepaths; Toronto has documented a large<br> percentage of dooring accidents.<br> ...<br><br> -- Roads of the coming century will accommodate an
increasingly strange<br> mix of vehicles. I'm waiting for small-displacement motorcycles to<br> come back; they're extremely widely used in many other countries.<br> Electric versions of same become more and more practical every year.<br> The Twike (side-by-side human/electric powered faired recumbent) and<br> similar machines are waiting in the wings. Every month, Popular<br> Science seems to have a story about another machine that's somewhere in<br> the continuum between roller skates and the traditional car. Many of<br> these devices are closer in speed to a bicycle than to a regular car.<br> Are we going to build special lanes for all of these categories of<br> conveyance? No, and I sure hope we don't even try. From the<br> standpoint of making viable public policy to accommodate all these<br> conveyances safely, I believe we already have a superb plan in place:<br> one set of rules, with speed positioning and destination positioning
by<br> individual need.<br> <br></div></blockquote><br>